[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.3% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 186, 03:11:44, step 189.
The boiler room's hot water was into its ninth day of being cut. They said three days; three became six, six became nine. A sheet of paper hung behind the gatehouse door, penciled: wash up as best you can. Tong's hand.
At the institute by six forty. The corridor light wanted a stomp. The old VCR clock still eleven minutes fast; nobody adjusted it, nobody mentioned it anymore.
Duty log header: September 24.
At seven twenty the September 24 frame entered the archive, S-11 and S-23. Layer 3: 33,841 rows. Sticky notes, third strip, sheet sixty-six.
Two items in the local segment. One: the senior university's term opening, the camera sweeping from a first-floor classroom up to the third, class schedules on the corridor wall papered over with papercutting and chorus. One: acceptance inspection of the streetlight refit, the new lamps white, the old lamps yellow, changed every other one, the inspector counting off his clipboard. The usual four done, two lines of summary, filed by ten.
The canteen television was on at noon. One brief ran: the municipal maternity hospital's autumn booking list for prenatal files was filled through March of next year; the hospital reminded parents-to-be to use the archive information rationally and not to crowd onto the same dates. The anchor added one line on finishing: the hospital's obstetrics consultations were up forty percent lately. Below the caption sat a hotline number, taking up two lines.
Lao Song sat down with his tray and said, "Picking dates for what."
Xiao Gao said, "Picking whether the child will still be here after."
Lao Song said, "Still have to manage the conceiving first."
Xiao Gao didn't laugh. He said, "My cousin's the same. Was October; moved to the twelfth lunar month." He said the two families' elders took the two sheets of paper and checked them across three evenings, then crossed out both of the October dates. He drank some soup and added, the second date they crossed was three days off my grandfather's birthday.
Lao Song said, "That's not close."
Xiao Gao said, "They say it's close."
He set his bowl down and said no more.
Lao Song set his phone beside his plate; two minutes' wait, and this one was a data-usage notice. He read it, switched it off, pocketed it. He said, "I'm going tomorrow."
I said, "Going where."
He said, "The neighboring county. My mother-in-law's. I hired a car — Sunday, fewer people at the window."
I said, "Can she even go."
He said, "In person. In a wheelchair, she's still in person."
With that he ate. He left nearly half a bowl behind that day.
At three in the afternoon Tong dug something red out of the gatehouse mail: a wedding invitation, his nephew's. The date had been changed once; the original crossed out in red pen, lightly, the numeral underneath still legible, a new one written beside it. Tong said the original day had collided with someone on that column. He said the family had someone who knew the practice; they'd held the two papers side by side and picked. He stood the invitation upright on the windowsill, leaning against the row of postcards.
On the glass door of the shop across from the institute a fourth line had gone up. The first three read: archive lookups; same-day results; company registry lookups, 4,800 a search. The fourth line's print was smaller than the rest: data backfill consultations, price on request. In the afternoon five people stood at the door, one of them holding a child. Among those coming out was one carrying his paper sideways. Tong saw it from the gatehouse and said: they're issuing them upright too now. Last week, still sideways.
One more item on the noon television, two sentences: a locality had instructed medical institutions that information contained in the archive must not serve as a basis for taking patients or opening prenatal files; existing bookings unaffected. Read out and gone — no picture, caption only.
Beyond the gatehouse's three piles, in the bundle the mail truck had brought, two handbills were tucked — business-card size, coated paper. The print read: data backfilled for you, 800 yuan an entry, effective this month. Tong drew them out, didn't sort them into any pile, and pressed them under the tally counter. He said, these don't count as mail. He said, the hate-mail pile has thinned — half a small stack gone this week. The backfill-request pile has thickened. He pointed right: the extra pile over there, clipped by itself.
Day 187, 03:11:44, step 190.
Sunday. Without my calling her, Nian took the piano bench in the morning and played it twice through. Fewer wrong notes the second time. When she finished she went to the mirror, opened her mouth and looked a while, and said, it's out a little more now.
In the afternoon we went to the market. On the way we passed a wedding-dress shop, glass polished bright, a roll-up banner at the door printed with auspicious dates, free readings, and beneath it one line of small print: inauspicious dates avoided. Another sign, handwritten, was stuck beside the banner: October fully booked. All the lights inside were on. No one there.
Nian asked, "Do you have to wear a dress that big for those pictures."
I said, "You do."
She said, "Did you ever wear one."
I said, "No."
She said, "Then what did you wear when you got married."
I said, "Something red."
She said, "Is it still around."
I said, "It's in the wardrobe."
She didn't ask again. She pulled her jacket zipper all the way up, then back down halfway.
In front of the fish stall two women were talking, talking about dates. One said there were no good days left in October — the good days had all been picked over. The other said, then November; November is still near. The hand holding the scale never stopped; the fish on it still flopped. The fishmonger glanced up at them, then back down at the money.
For dinner I made green beans. Nian said, beans again.
I said, "There's more coming."
She said, "Fine." She laid her own chopsticks out, laid them straight.
The three-in-the-morning step Sunday night — I was home and didn't see it. Monday morning I asked, and Xiao Gao said it went up, same as always, not a step off. He said he'd watched the clock specially: 03:11:44.
That day Nian's homeroom teacher sent a message, two lines: finals on schedule as before; reduce unnecessary outings for the time being. I read her the second line. She said, the teacher means the upper grades. She said another one had transferred out of her class too; the desk was carried off, two desks pushed together, and that's where the cleaning tools live now. She was picking through oranges as she said it — picked up three, put one back.
Day 188, 03:11:44, step 191.
Duty log header: September 26.
Writing that line, I paused. In the catalog table, Layer 2 — the last day with any body to it was this one.
At seven twenty the September 26 frame entered the archive, S-11 and S-17. Layer 3: 34,265 rows. Sticky notes, third strip, sheet sixty-eight.
Two items in the local segment. One: a notice of programming changes starting tomorrow on this station, three program titles read out. One: a water-supply mains inspection before winter, the stretches to be inspected scheduled through the end of November. The usual four done, filed. When I finished this frame's summary I turned the page. The next page's header was blank.
At ten in the morning, the review group's third day. Upward of seventy matches inside the scope; the baseband pulled once through, two matches re-decoded, everything lined up. Adebayo sat on a chair outside the conference room waiting, his three-column sheet spread across his knees. The committee had obtained the event company's attendance tallies, a page a day. He filled the fourth column from those, square by square.
When he reached the August 8 line his pen hesitated. In that square he wrote fifty-eight thousand, capped his pen, uncapped it again, and added the odd four hundred alongside.
He said, "The data's arrived."
I said, "Mm."
He said, "Borrowed — I didn't misstate that. Borrowed is what it is." He paused. "When it goes back, the table doesn't go with it."
He squared the sheet and clipped it back into its binder. Standing up, he pushed the drawer shut with his hand as he rose. The two kraft envelopes inside — I didn't see them, but I knew they were there. He didn't mention the other matches.
In the morning I walked Nian to school. Before leaving the house she turned her music to the first page and said, new piece next week. I asked, which piece. She said, don't know — teacher hasn't said. She closed the music, stuffed it into the side pocket of her schoolbag; the zipper jammed halfway, she tugged it twice and got it herself.
At nine Lao Song came. He didn't go to his station first; he went straight to the row of tables in the canteen and sat down. By the time we gathered he was already into it.
He said, "It's done."
He said, "In person. She came in her wheelchair, third in line. The person at the window said, if the thumbprint won't take, you can press three times."
He said, "She pressed three times. The third came out round."
He said, "The card is in her name now."
Someone asked, so does that count?
Lao Song said, "I didn't ask whether it counts." He pushed his meal card deeper into his pocket. "I know a card is a card. But the card has her name on it."
Nobody picked that up. He finished everything, not one grain of rice left. On his way out he passed the gatehouse and told Tong; Tong picked the wedding invitation up off the windowsill, looked at it, and set it back. A printed date can't be changed, so his nephew's family simply had the run reprinted on thinner paper. Tong pinched the edge to weigh it and said: half the weight.
The woman from finance came up the stairs with a stack of forms; the top one wasn't yellow, it was white. She said the white forms were up this month, the yellow ones not many.
At two thirty in the afternoon Ye Zhen came up hugging a stack of papers, the bottom sheaf clipped for fear it would scatter. She set the stack on my desk and drew off the top two sheets.
She said, "It's sorted. All sixty-one, by entry count, most to fewest, one shop to a line."
The first sheet was one long column of numbers. Her finger came down it from the top and stopped mid-sheet.
She said, "Forty-fourth place, one hundred seventeen entries — that's the shoe repairer." Her finger lifted a stretch. "From forty-fifth down, that's the in-or-out divide. The seventeen that are absent, six entries at the most, all at this end."
She squared the two sheets together.
She said, "You want a number. Can I give it now? I can't. What I can give you is two edges. Fewer than six entries — fourteen of the seventeen. More than one hundred seventeen — not one shop missing."
She said, "In between there's a gap, a hundred-odd entries wide. One stretch of data that won't fill. We wait for a second patch."
She drew out the second sheet. That one wasn't a ranking; it was a few lines of dates.
She said, "One more thing. This month, in the gatehouse's bundle of mail, the backfill handbills — I counted seven. The shop's door added a fourth line. Lao Song's mother-in-law: five entries became six." She said, "The backfilled entries don't look like the ones that grew on their own."
I said, "How so."
She said, "Ones that grow on their own come broken up — ten years, twenty years, dense stretches and sparse ones. Dense the year the shop opened; sparse, nothing at all. The backfilled ones all fall inside these few months, one pressed against the next, one and the same hand."
She capped her pen.
She said, "I have to open a column of its own on the backfill records. Otherwise in three years this table won't be readable."
I said, "Who's in that column now."
She said, "Counting my sister, two." She hugged the papers tighter.
She squared the stack and carried it off. At the door she stopped, without turning, and said, "I've already named that column. Backfill."
At five in the afternoon Zhou Yansheng was waiting for me at the stairhead. He said, "Are you coming tomorrow."
I said, "I'm coming."
He said, "Mm." He said, "Early."
He went down two steps, then stopped. He said, "The report — stay out of it now."
I said, "Mm."
He had his lunch box in his hand; one of its clasps was gone, held by a rubber band wound around. He went down ahead of me.
That evening the institute added to the dinner; the canteen gave everyone an extra chicken leg. Nobody said why. What was in the bowls said it. Shen Yi stood at the canteen door without a tray, watched that stretch through to the end, and left.
At seven the television carried the man. He was one that column had named — the April obituary column, the seventh line of its thirty-seven seconds. The news ran ninety seconds of him speaking. He was past eighty, in a dark suit, pages in hand, reading slowly. When he came to the place where the archive had written him, he stopped, folded the page once, and looked up.
He said, "I refuse this."
He paused.
He said, "I refuse every word of it."
He put the folded pages into the inside pocket of his jacket and stood where he was; nothing more. The shot didn't cut away at once — it gave him two extra seconds, and in those two seconds he was looking at some place off-camera.
Nobody in the canteen spoke. The broadcast cut back to the studio, where the anchor froze for half a second and said, "We'll be back shortly."
Someone asked which country he was from. Xiao Gao said, it doesn't say. Under the picture there was only the one small line: footage from foreign media. Whoever aired it hadn't marked the country at all.
The rebroadcast ran at seven thirty. What Adebayo watched was the rebroadcast. He said, the pause is shorter. Someone asked, which pause. He said, after he finished the second sentence, standing there not talking — two seconds in the live broadcast. One second left in the rebroadcast.
Xiao Gao said, that's how aired versions are; they trim to time.
Adebayo said, what they trimmed is exactly those two seconds.
A viewership statistic followed the story. The anchor read out three billion nine hundred eighty million, calling it the simultaneous audience for those ninety seconds — a record since the thing first went on the air. Xiao Gao wrote a 4 on the table with the end of his chopsticks, then wrote billion beside it, and said: pad it a little and it comes out whole.
Nobody picked that up.
Adebayo spoke first. He said, "He'd read it."
Ye Zhen said, "By now it isn't only him."
Nobody carried it on. Lao Song stood and carried his tray away. Tong came over from the gatehouse and asked what had been said; someone told him, and he pressed the tally counter in his pocket without a sound.
At seven thirty we went our ways. The light in the third-floor room was still on, a warm line of it leaking under the door. Shen Yi's office door was closed; the line under it was lit too.
When I came downstairs the duty log lay open on the desk. The square for September 26 was filled. Tomorrow's square — I didn't know what to write.
Home by ten, Nian asleep. I stood a moment at her door; she'd turned her own lamp off, the quilt's corner tucked under her. The socks for tomorrow hung over the chair back. I set the alarm ten minutes early, washed the bowls, wiped the stove, and went to bed.