On the night of the twenty-first of the twelfth month He Che called to say he'd like to come by, bringing a few things, the sort that wouldn't come clear over the phone. Behind his voice came the sound of pages turning, one page, one page, not turning fast. He said, have both tapes ready. He said, and the desk calendar. She asked what he wanted the desk calendar for. He paused on the other end and said, to check numbers.
He came the next morning, the wheeled case still the one with the ringing wheel; she heard it from the stairwell. In the case: three printed drafts, two boxes of cards, a black notebook, a roll of photocopies cinched with a rubber band. He laid the things out on the table in the order she knew — his whiteboard's way, left to right, old to new. At the far right he cleared a space and said, this part is for you.
What he spread open first was the ledger. The thirty-year bound volumes he couldn't borrow; what he'd brought was a copy, in his own hand, one line to a year, thirty lines copied. A number at the end of every line. He ran the thirty numbers into a single line, drawn on a sheet of plotting paper — the paper gridded in squares, the line in pencil — and when the line was drawn he set the pencil down and said, look.
She looked. The line came back to the same day every twenty-nine years, its error never past two days; and on coming back to the same day, the magnitude stood lower than the twenty-nine years before by four parts in a thousand. These two things she had done half a lifetime; she could recite them with her eyes shut. She waited for him to go on.
He Che said, I had always taken this line for a record. Records are what have cycles — the pendulum's kind. A pause. He said, last month I stopped taking it that way. He touched the pencil tip to the right end of the line and carried it outward in the air, out past the edge of the graph paper. He said, each round lower than the last by four parts in a thousand. Lower until lower is done. He said, it isn't repeating. It's counting down.
The room went quiet one beat. The radiator water took it up.
She said, counting down to which day.
He Che took her desk calendar over, turned it to the twelfth month, then to the first month, and spread it flat. He said, this number you've been counting — on the eighth it stood at thirty-five, yes. He said, I ran it the other way. Push this line back two twenty-nines: before the First Session there was one more twenty-nine; the ledger is older than the system — the system thirty years, the line walking longer than thirty. He said, the first volume of the green bound set I went and turned through; on the inside cover, before the first page of the first volume, a slip had once been pasted, torn off, half left, and on the half one character: session. He said, which means before volume one there was another volume, and it never reached the shelf. He said, I took the magnitude-seven entry and ran it outward — four parts in a thousand, four parts in a thousand, multiplied round upon round — and he named a number, a small number, with years riding after it. He capped the pen and said, I ran it three times. Three times it came to the same. He said, the day Zhou Shu turns twelve, the line is at zero.
She set her hand on the desk calendar. The calendar's paper was cool; her hand was warmer than the paper. She thought of her own twelfth year, the assessment form, terminated, no residue, the final stroke of her mother's signature flicking upward; of that damaged file on the archive room's second level underground; of those four minutes on the stage on the first of the twelfth month. All the days inside thirty years of the system were, on this sheet of graph paper, one line going down; at the head of the line there was a day, and the day was Zhou Shu's birthday.
She said, a timetable.
He Che said, mm. He didn't say the word for dead. He didn't say a single word.
The second thing he spread was a card box. The one-to-fifty box he didn't touch; he opened the other, fifty cards, every one carrying only a number. He said, the fifty words the seventh edition deleted — I worked them six years, always taking them for empty places. Missing words, you fill them in and it's done. A pause. He said, last week I poured this box out on my desk and passed one whole night through them, card by card — six years of empty places I'd passed through — and suddenly I saw they aren't empty.
She asked, saw how.
He said, by their places.
He laid the box out on the table in a line, fifty-one to one hundred, numbers up. He said, count the squares. Fifty squares, and every square has a counterpart sitting in one to fifty. He drew out number four, then number fifty-four, and set them side by side: number four is bowl. Number fifty-four, the children couldn't report. He said, if fifty-four were ever translated, it would have to be — and there he stopped with the sentence half said and put it another way: that thing Chinese can't hold. The bowl is set, the hand still doesn't dare let go — that stretch: in Chinese, one character and it's done — set — done. Over there, the word isn't finished while the thing isn't finished. He Laosan said it in his twenties; what I heard was the retelling, what you heard was the original. He said, what fifty-four holds is that stretch. Fifty words for things; fifty of this stretch. He said, the things belong to the household. The stretch belongs to the space between two households.
She counted on down the line of cards. At thirty-seven she stopped. Number thirty-seven, a thing-word — the square she had never once reported in her life. She drew out number thirty-seven, found number eighty-seven, and set the two side by side on the table. She said, this square — empty on both sides. He Che looked and didn't pick up his pen. He said, a square empty on both sides. A pause. He said, I've noted it. I won't ask.
From the roll of photocopies he drew one sheet and pushed it across. The paper had leaked out of the case file, part of the batch transferred over with the damaged volume. On it a child's pencil, under two printed characters — reason — and the line written there read: These words are like other people's bowls — our family has no food to put in them.
She looked down. The hand was her hand. Her seven-year-old hand, the strokes laid heavy, the last horizontal of the final character run out past its box. This page she had never seen in her life; this sentence she had never remembered writing — the Laba lesson her mouth had carried thirty years, but this one had never been in the mouth, and it had lain on paper thirty years, waiting until today to come out of the case file. She picked the page up, set it down again, and her finger rested a while on the words other people's bowls. She said, our family has no food to put in them. She said, even then I knew there was no filling them.
He Che didn't take the sentence up. He wrote something in the black notebook, the rubber band biting his wrist. He said, I gave this class of words a name; when I first wrote it down, it went on paper with a question mark. He turned the notebook around for her: four characters on the page — caretaking words — the question mark struck out, struck out hard. He said, saying it out loud, I swallowed the question mark. He said, fifty words, fifty charges. Whenever the grown-ups of some house go off on a long trip and leave the child with a neighbor, what they say is this same set: where the bowls are; how to keep an eye on the stretch before the water boils; when a thing is passed to you halfway, don't let go. He said, it isn't teaching a language. A pause. He said, it's handing over.
She thought of the sentence by the stove at the old mill. She said, Wei Dongquan says: the words came later.
He Che set the sentence down as it was spoken, and when it was written he said, six years, twelve hundred pages I've written — not worth this one sentence. He said, the words came later — the matter comes first. It had a thing to hand over, and only then did it need fifty words to hand it over with. The children caught the matter first; the words are empty; the numbers were kept for the words. He said, so in deleting those fifty, the children deleted rightly — and not rightly. Rightly, because those fifty words, turned into Chinese, every one of them has to land, and the instant it lands it's finished — finished standing at the head of the sentence, and the charge falls apart. Not rightly — and here he stopped a long time — what's not right is that the words were deleted and the matter is still there. Words can be deleted. The matter can't be.
The third thing was the photocopies, three pages in all, borrowed from the archive room; on the lending slip, in the purpose column, he had written: cross-file checking. Number J-7-013; title, Window Period Early Termination (Early Closure) Trial; twenty-seven pages — and what he had brought out was the catalog page, the approval page, and the conclusion page. On the approval page, the trial-subject column held a registration number; the name was not printed. The conclusion page carried a single line: before and after window closure, no correlational difference between the sample's language behavior and the closure mechanism. The year of the signature was the registration year.
She read the line three times. She said, the trial was run.
He Che said, approved — and run for half a month. A pause. He said, I checked it against the ledger again — that month of the trial, thirty years ago, that month: not one new word in the ledger. A clean-swept month. He said, I circled that month; guess what it looks like. She said, like the Silent Zone. He Che said, like the Silent Zone. He said, the child was there, the machines were there, the forms were there — and it said nothing the whole month through. He said, this item I entered in the appendix. The appendix doesn't count — he checked, swallowed the sentence back, and said, it counts. From this time on, it counts.
She stacked the three photocopies together with the reason page. Thirty years before, someone had tried to shut her window early, and the trial had come to nothing; thirty years on, she had filled in the forms for her own daughter, signed, rebutted applications, recorded tapes, walked the whole way to the twenty-second of the twelfth month, with a timetable counting down to zero lying on the table. She said, that half month — I haven't the least impression of it. He Che said, no impression is the right state. That month it wasn't speaking to you — the part that speaks to you is the part you remember.
With that page settled, he asked for the desk calendar again, took up the pencil from the box for the eighth, and walked the tip box by box downward. The eighth, thirty-five. The ninth, thirty-four. At the nineteenth, twenty-four. At today's box, twenty-one. Done, he lifted the pencil and said, this string of numbers I checked twice in the night, set against the line on the graph paper, head and tail trimmed: the two ends differ by zero. He turned the calendar around to face her, set the pencil tip on the box for the twenty-second, and said, count it once more. She took it and counted. From the eighth to the twenty-second, fourteen taps, thirty-five stepping down to twenty-one, not one number off between. She said, differs by zero. He Che said, differs by zero. He said, one line, one calendar, matched — and past the match — there he stopped himself, his hand making one pass over the tabletop, as if sweeping the second half of the sentence off the table, and said, I'm answerable only as far as the match. What comes after isn't the numbers' business.
Then they played the tapes.
On the seven-year-old's tape, He Che listened to the one sentence in the middle. He sat without moving; when it finished he had her rewind and listened again. After the second time he asked for no more rewinding. He wrote in the black notebook, and when it was written he read it back to check: Like setting one more bowl on a stack of bowls. It's on. My hand still doesn't dare let go. Reading it back, he said, it went into the files back in the nineties; the night of the first of the twelfth month it came out of your daughter's mouth again. He said, the sentence is the same one; on the account there's a going and a coming. He said, it didn't say that one idly. That sentence is the hardest one in the handover — and the hardest sentence it taught to the youngest child.
On the twelve-year-old's tape, she played the first half first. The counting, one to fifty, the child's voice that set its words out steady walking through the room; He Che sat up straight to listen, and the pen in his hand never went to the notebook. At forty-four, the tape stopped half a beat. He Che raised his head and looked at her. She looked back at him. Neither of them spoke, and forty-five came out. He Che lowered his head and wrote one line in the notebook, a short one.
Into the second half, and that layer of rise and fall came out. He Che took his watch off and set it on the table and counted. One long. Twelve short. He counted three rounds, and when the third round was done he put the watch back on; the strap took two tries before it closed. He said, the intervals are the same, even down to the second. He said, six years I've done signal work; I know what a machine looks like. A machine gets tired. This doesn't get tired. He said, this isn't it speaking. He was quiet a long time. He said, it's waiting.
She took the sentence up. She said, the stops run longer than the saying — like waiting for someone to take it. Zhou Shu said it: the first of the twelfth month, those four minutes on the stage — she said it was like waiting for someone to take it. She said, and I didn't take it.
He Che said, nor did I. He said, thirty years, and no one took it. He said, second person, zero cases; I searched three databases, zero cases — today I finally saw it through: zero cases is not the children's fault for not reporting. It's that the column was never built to hold it. The whole sentence is waiting for someone; whether the word for you is carried in the sentence or not comes to the same thing. When the children translated, that you, once translated, would belong to everybody — and so they didn't translate it. He Laosan didn't translate it. Erya didn't report. Your daughter took the headphones off, on the stage. He said, as many times as it said it in thirty years, that many times we blocked it. The ways of blocking were different; the blocking was one and the same.
The door opened then. Zhou Shu stood in the doorway, the red yarn in her hand, a thread riding the needle. She said, I heard the back of it. She came over, stood at the table, and took one turn around the things lying there: the graph paper, the blank cards, the reason page, the three photocopies, the two tapes. She said, caretaking words — that's the name you gave it?
He Che said, I gave it. Gave it with a question mark.
Zhou Shu looked at the four characters a while. She picked up the reason page and looked at her mother. She said, Mom, this is yours? She said, mine. When I wrote it I didn't know what I was writing. Zhou Shu set the paper back, set it dead square. She said, the name came late. She said, when they deleted them, you weren't there. Now you know — she shifted the yarn into her left hand and lifted her head — so now that you know, does it still count?
Nobody in the room took it. The radiator water took it. He Che's hand lay on the black notebook, not writing. He slid the rubber band off his wrist and back onto the notebook, wound twice. He said, this question — my system has no cell for it. He said, I'll go back and open a cell for it.
Zhou Shu said, open the cell, and write it in. Saying that, she went back to her room; the door not shut tight, a one-finger width of gap left standing.
He Che left at four in the afternoon. The wheeled case rang down the corridor to the stairhead; the ringing stopped, then rang another stretch — he had paused downstairs, and then gone.
At eight in the evening Zhou Yu called: the post-holiday commissioning had been moved up; he'd be home on the twenty-sixth of the twelfth month; was there anything on the list that could be done early. She flipped through: three lines left to sign. On the line for the confirmation thirty days before window closure, Zhou Yu had long since set a note in small characters: seven days before the eleventh of the first month, sign ahead. She said, that line takes your signature in person. Zhou Yu said, then I sign it on the twenty-sixth. Off the phone, she put away the two things He Che had left on the table: a photocopy of the graph paper, with one small line added before he left — fourth case, self-attested, the twenty-second of the twelfth month; and that page of the literature, where beside the line not observed in any non-translator population he had added a row in characters one size smaller than the text, reading: this sentence is voided; a separate entry stands. She stacked the two sheets with the reason page and pressed them by the tin box.
Before shutting the door she squared the table: the two tapes side by side into the tin box, the reason page pressed on top, the desk calendar set straight, open to the twenty-second of the twelfth month. With the pencil she set a dot in that box.
Twenty-one days left.