She drafted the application on the third night of her shift, on the station's own letterhead — the array station's full name printed at the top, with four red characters after it that read "for research use"; not until the fourth line did she remember that a document like this should not go out on the unit's paper, so she crossed out the first three lines and copied them over again, and by the time she finished it was past two, and the corridor's motion-sensor light had switched itself off once — she hadn't looked up when it went, because looking up meant finding her place again, and she wasn't willing to pay that price for a glance.
The document's formal title was Application for Early Termination of the Window Period in the Case of Zhou Shu. Three attachments: a technical statement of nineteen pages, a risk assessment of six, a guardian's consent form of one. The technical statement took her six evenings to write, and its core was a single sentence — since the translation sheet came back every twenty-nine years and could be forecast to the calendar day, then the closing of the window was not a process that happened naturally with age but a process with a timetable; and a process with a timetable could be moved ahead of its timetable. When she got to the characters for "moved ahead," she paused, circled the verb for "led," changed it to "lured," decided that looked ugly, and settled at last on something far more neutral: early termination.
She had worked the dates out once: the plan had to be in place ahead of the forecast point, saturation exposure needed a full fourteen days, and after the fourteen days came a seven-day observation window; counting backward, the filing could be no later than the end of October. She wrote those lines in the upper-left corner of the letterhead, circled them in pencil when she was done, and then saw that the circle enclosed a deadline she had set for herself, not one set by the document.
In the risk section she spared nothing. She wrote four items: language ability irreversible; memory unretrievable; hearing unaffected; of all past cases, not one recovery. After the fourth she gave her source — thirty years; 2,107 registered acquirers.
In the six pages she added an appendix after the fourth item: the aftereffects registered over thirty years following termination of the window period, nineteen cases in all, and the word that appeared most often in the symptoms column was "can't find it." She didn't sort them. She arranged them by year, and in the last year's row two printed characters were waiting: to be supplemented.
Zhou Yu read it on the seventh day. He turned to page ten of the nineteen and stopped, went back to page one, and went back and forth three times.
He said, this is an intervention.
She said, this is protection.
He said, listen to yourself. Listen to those two words.
She didn't answer. She capped the pen, gently.
He signed — in the countersignature column — and after signing he laid the pen across the page. He went to the study and photocopied something, came back, and spread it on the table in front of her: a copy of Attachment 2, the page with the seal impressions, the one with the thumbprint across the seam, its edge curled. He pressed the curled edge flat with his finger, three times, and didn't move his hand away when he was done.
He said, I wrote this clause.
She said, I know.
He said, I wrote it. Take it and use it.
She said, even if I don't use it, they'll bring it out.
Those days, Zhou Yu went around the apartment adjusting things. He added a second lining to the router's tin box — aluminum foil, cut a full ring wider than the box, folded in and pressed flat; he wiped the refrigerator's mechanical thermostat once, then turned the knob back where it had been, aligning the markings with his fingernail. He did all of it without a word, and when he finished he put the tools in a shoebox and pushed the shoebox behind the door. Everything he touched was something that stood on the outside, between her and it.
She filed at the district Window Period Administration, third floor, the same intake window as the last time, a processing-schedule sheet lying under the glass. The allowed time was fifteen working days; the meeting actually convened on the eighth. It met in a small conference room on the fifth floor of the outpatient building at the Municipal Third Hospital, a long table with old scratches across its surface, dust settled in the grooves, impossible to wipe out; seven members present, chaired by a man surnamed Han, white-haired, who spoke a name first, then the title, then what was on the table for discussion today.
The procedure: the applicant states her case for ten minutes, the members ask questions, the applicant withdraws, the vote, delivery of the decision. She carried three things in: the soft notebook, a photocopy of the filing receipt, and a hand-drawn calendar chart — drawn three times, because the first time she got one square wrong, wrong in February. She spoke for nine minutes. In the ninth minute she read out the four risks, and when she looked up, nobody said anything.
The first questioner asked: after early termination, would she still have language.
Lin Wanzhao said, on the existing record, termination is termination. Not one case of recovery.
The second asked: in other words, what you are applying for is an irreversible injury.
She said, yes.
The third asked: is there a therapeutic purpose.
She paused about three seconds and said, no.
The fourth asked about the cycle: the twenty-nine-year sequence you rely on — on the receipt, it's classified as translation-sheet data.
She said, a classification is not a nature.
The man said, for us, the classification determines what we're allowed to rely on.
The fifth asked about Zhou Shu herself: does she know about this.
Lin Wanzhao said, she has not been told.
The man said, in other words, the person to be subjected to it has never given consent.
She said, she is eleven.
The man said, we'll record the view of an eleven-year-old. But that's not what's before us today.
Director Han wrote one line in his notebook, then spun his pen half a turn.
She withdrew at ten forty. The room for withdrawing was at the end of the corridor; the chairs were hard; a fire extinguisher hung on the wall with its inspection card taped on, and the last inspection had been the year before.
The vote: rejected, five; abstaining, two.
The decision ran two pages. Page one was the conclusion; page two, two grounds. The first: the application contravened Clause 7 of Attachment 2 of the Window Period Guardianship Agreement, a clause added by the guardian in his own hand and sealed with a thumbprint across the seam, undertaking that no non-therapeutic intervention would be carried out — and its force of constraint stood above the standard printed terms. The second: the technical route cited in the application shared its origin with the Seventh Session's "early termination of the window period" (early closure) trial, whose archive had been sealed by a numbered directive in some year and was not available for inspection, so the data cited by the applicant could not be verified.
Director Han read the result without raising his head, and when he finished he turned the paper face-down on the table — then turned it back up, remembering he still had to read the remedy: the applicant may apply for reconsideration within fifteen working days of receiving the decision. He read that sentence a little faster.
Her hand was dry when she signed the delivery receipt. The receipt was made in duplicate; she signed twice, and both signatures came out the same size.
She made two photocopies of the decision. One for Zhou Yu, one for the kraft envelope. The copy for Zhou Yu she left on the dining table without a word. He took it when he got up in the night for water; in the morning she saw the paper in the trash, torn in half, the tear uneven.
She did collect the reconsideration form. Collecting it meant writing the date in a signature ledger; she wrote it, folded the form in half, and pushed it into the outer pocket of her bag. Fifteen working days later she threw it away, without opening it again.
The afternoon she came back to the station, Xiao Jiang was standing at the mouth of the corridor and stubbed out his cigarette when he saw her. He said, good that it was rejected.
She said, mm.
He said, if you'd pulled it off, there'd be no end of it after you.
She didn't take that up. She went in, set her bag on the chair, and opened the window a crack.
Leaving the hospital she didn't go back to the station; she went to the archive room first. Second level underground, the camphor smell heavier than last time — new material stored, probably. The rules were the same three: no photographing, nothing taken out, the paper could only be copied by hand. The keeper was a woman of about fifty, sitting behind an old monitor knitting, two stitches and a glance at the door; when Lin Wanzhao came in she lifted her head, said nothing, and went back to her knitting. Lin Wanzhao didn't file a new request. She used the purpose stated on the old retrieval slip — "long-term sequence comparison of the underhum" — and the purpose line carried no year limit, so she pushed the years back thirty.
The catalog cards were handwritten, blue ink, the characters slanting up to the right. The one she found: number J-7-013, title "Window Period Early Termination (Early Closure) Trial," two dates in the span column with a short dash between them, twenty-seven in the pages column, and in the remarks column a blue stamp with two characters: sealed. The stamp had landed crooked, its left edge crossing the binding line printed on the card.
She copied the number and the page count into her own soft notebook, switching to the pencil with the tape wound around its barrel.
She drew out the cards before and after that one too. The one before was the Sixth Session's hearing screening, eleven pages; the one after was the Eighth Session's dictionary editorial work, thirty-four pages, remarks blank. The handwriting on all three cards was the same person's, slanting up to the right. She copied all three numbers, then slid them back in their places — her finger dragged along a card's edge as she put it in and took off a little dust.
Then she filled out a retrieval slip. The reply came three days later, machine-printed, four lines in the reason-for-refusal field; she read only the first line, and the first line was a document number. She didn't file the reply. She tucked it into the soft notebook, into the page where she'd copied the numbers, then stood the notebook upright on the corner of the desk for about ten seconds, and laid it flat.
In the days that followed she went through the house and shut down everything that could be shut again. The router's tin box she left alone; the refrigerator's thermostat she wiped once. At the far end of the dining table Zhou Shu was filling in the translation sheet. The entries column stood empty; she filled in the date and the time block, then sat, turning the pen in her hand.
Zhou Shu said, Mom — what if one day I finish saying it?
Lin Wanzhao said, if you finish, you fill in zero.
Zhou Shu said, it's not zero.
She didn't take that up. She washed the bowls in the sink, and by the third one she heard Zhou Shu set the pen down.
The other road was herself. She requested her own window period file, and in the reason-for-application field she wrote four characters: personal matter. That field she filled in faster than any other.
The file was a thin paper envelope. The string at the mouth had snapped once and been rethreaded, in a different color; on the face of the envelope two stamps — one released, one returned, and the returned column still blank. Inside, three things: a registration form, an assessment form, a completion notice.
On the registration form, one character had been added after her name — added later, in a different hand from what came before, small, at the lower right of the name. She looked at it for two seconds and didn't erase it.
The assessment form was an official form: Window Period Acquisitional Capacity Termination Assessment. The date was a day in December. Age column: twelve years, one month. The conclusion, six characters: acquisitional capacity terminated; after it, three in parentheses: no residue. The assessor's signature was so sloppy that beneath it the form carried a line of printed type: Qu. In the lower-right corner of the form was a telephone number, seven digits, no area code, the spacing between digits wider than in the body text.
In the guardian's signature column, her mother's name. The characters small, kept to the bottom half of the box. Those years her mother signed like that in her schoolwork too, after "reviewed by parent," the final stroke flicking upward. She knew that flick.
Her finger rested on that line for about two seconds.
The completion notice was half a page. The bureau's full name at the top; three lines of text; the third line a courtesy: thank you for your cooperation. The stamp at the foot was set straight, and the date was the day after the assessment. She read that date once, put the paper back in the envelope, and did not tie the string again.
The call went out at four in the afternoon. She was alone in the office, door open, the corridor lights on every other one. The landline was an old one, the receiver heavy, the cord a coil wound around itself too many times by whoever had it before her, twisted into one strand near the body of the phone; she unwound a stretch of it and left the part that wouldn't unwind.
Before dialing she did a thing she had not done in thirty years: ask someone. She listed three questions on a memo slip, then crossed out the second — she couldn't have answered it herself. She copied the seven-digit number three times, the first twice on the memo slip, the third in the corner of the soft notebook; then she tore the slip up, into four pieces.
She dialed. It rang to the seventh ring, and connected.
A man's voice: Hello.
She said, I'm looking for the doctor on this assessment form.
The other end didn't answer right away. Three seconds, or four.
The man said, he left eight years ago.
She said, then this is —
The man said, I took over the number. My name is Wei.
She said, Wei Dongquan.
Another silence on the line.
He said, thirty years. Nobody has called this number.
She said, maybe I've dialed wrong.
He said, you haven't dialed wrong.
She said, I want to ask about something.
He said, say it.
She said, not on the phone.
He said, then don't say it on the phone.
She asked, then where.
He said, take down an address.
He gave the east end of the first floor of the old textile mill's administration building. She said, that place is long gone. He said, the door is still there.
She picked up the pencil — the one with the tape on the barrel — and copied the address on the back of the soft notebook, on the reverse of the page that read "twenty-nine, zero point four, November nineteenth," pressing so lightly she could feel the marks of the front side under the paper.
She said, why have you kept this number.
He didn't answer right away.
She said, hello?
He said, your session did one thing —
And stopped.
He said, that can wait.
She said, until when.
He said, until you come.
She heard him set the receiver down, very gently, as if laying it on a cloth.
She put the receiver back on the phone and sat for a while.
Afterward she looked the name up. Not in the bureau's active register; not in the retired column either. She tried another way in, and in the pre-Eighth-Session staffing table found a matching name, registered post: "recorder," registered thirty years before she entered the bureau, and after the post two characters in parentheses: seconded. She closed the result without printing it.
Outside the window someone was unloading freight; sheet metal hit the ground, three times. She pulled the desk calendar out from under the phone, turned to November nineteenth, and wrote one number in that square with her pencil.
Nine days.