[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 189, 03:11:44, step 192.
The step came up. I watched it come from the duty room: the curve lifted once, held, the same as the previous one hundred eighty-eight days.
At seven twenty, no frame entered the archive.
At seven twenty-five, none. At seven thirty S-17 asked on the pool channel whether any station had received. Eleven stations: one zero came back, then ten more zeros.
I pulled up the catalog table. Layer 2's last entry still sat at September 26. The Layer 4 square — I clicked it open, still empty. An empty square is not the same as a zero; this square didn't even have a zero.
At eight Zhou Yansheng came. He stood behind me and watched a while, then said, write down today's status. He said, how to write it, you decide.
In the duty log I wrote: September 27, no frame.
When I turned to this page yesterday, the header was blank. Today it had two words.
At nine the pool issued a notice, two lines: all stations verify receive chains; the carrier is present, power normal. By ten the eleven stations had all reported back; the chains were sound. Eleven stations receiving the same thing, and none of them able to decode a frame.
Shen Yi came by in the morning and stood in the duty room doorway without entering. He glanced at my screen and said, are the sticky notes still going.
I said, going with what to record.
He said, then don't.
Sticky notes, third strip: stopped at sheet sixty-eight.
Day 190, 03:11:44, step 193. The step up as always. No frame. Day 191, no frame. Day 192, no frame.
On the third day Tong carved a stamp, rubber, two words: NO FRAME. He trial-printed it on scrap paper to show me; the frame character was missing a vertical stroke on its right. He said, missing is missing — it still reads. From then on the duty log carried his stamp and my writing, both of them.
The canteen's chicken legs went away; cabbage stewed with glass noodles came back. The boiler room's hot water returned on the eleventh day, two days past the notice.
The man on television — from that week on, a new item every two or three days.
The first was his schedule. A trip abroad set for April of next year, canceled. A reporter asked why April. He said, April — I have an engagement. Someone asked what engagement; he didn't answer. That small line on the caption was still there — footage from foreign media — and the country still wasn't named.
The second was his diet. His kitchen printed the week's menus and released them: no red meat, the oil cut thin, staple portions down by a third. One item filmed his dinner — half a plate of greens, a bowl of soup. He finished, turned the bowl upside down onto the plate, and said to the camera: that's it.
The third was walking. Fifty minutes at dusk every day, a fixed route, anyone free to follow. The first night, forty-odd people; the third night, two busloads; then the local transport authority issued a notice and yielded him one lane. He walked without speaking, in an old jacket, zipper half up.
Meetings at the institute were short those days. The review group finished every match inside its scope, upward of seventy; the re-decodes all matched; the deviations still numbered two, DV-001 and DV-002. After handing over the photocopy of his three-column sheet, Adebayo kept the original spread on his desk, the fourth column now filled, filled from that stack of figures the committee had provided. When the last square was done he turned the sheet face down on the desk and left it there the whole afternoon; then he turned it back and clipped it in.
Those days Ye Zhen carried her paper bag around with her. The second patch was never coming — she said it before I could. She said, what I was waiting for was picture. There's no more picture. She said, the sample is this one patch, sixty-one shops. She said, two edges — two edges is all I can give. She wound the bag's string twice around and said, the good thing is the edges are still there.
I said, the good thing.
She said, that leader of yours too — walking his own road. Then she stopped short. Misspoke. He isn't ours.
She left. I stood at the stairhead a while. The third-floor room's door was shut; no light under it. The car still sat at the mouth of the lane, under a layer of poplar leaves nobody swept.
Day 214, 03:11:44, step 217. No frame.
That day the television carried his physical. The tests had been done by a hospital in his own country; they held up two pages, and the doctor read out four items — blood pressure, blood sugar, blood lipids, electrocardiogram. On the ECG the doctor said: no abnormality. Someone asked: and the heart. The doctor said: the ECG shows no abnormality. Asked again, the doctor put the pages back in their folder and said: the report is here. Read it yourselves.
In the canteen, watching that item, Adebayo said, he's living himself long.
Lao Song said, meaning what.
Adebayo said, the list wrote him down for April, and he insists on living past April. He said, a year at a time — every day he lives past it, that paper is wrong by one more day.
Ye Zhen said, first he has to live to it.
The canteen went quiet for a beat. Lao Song set his chopsticks down, then picked them up again.
That evening Lao Song said, my mother-in-law has made a call with that card now.
Someone asked, called whom.
He said, me. She said the frozen dumplings in the freezer wanted clearing out — they were taking up half a shelf.
Somebody laughed. Lao Song didn't. He said, it rang twice and I picked up. I was afraid it wouldn't ring.
Day 228, 03:11:44, step 231. No frame.
At five past ten that morning the canteen television cut in with an item. The same small line: footage from foreign media. The picture showed a house, cars at the gate, people going in and out, no sound; the line at the bottom read: he died of cardiac arrest this morning, in the study of his home.
It ran twice. By the second running the canteen was standing-room, and nobody changed the channel.
The day he died was forty days after he said, I refuse this.
At ten thirty an urgent letter came from the pool: each sub-venue to check the obituary column's original, lines four through eight. They pulled the original up — thirty-seven seconds — onto the conference room screen, ran it once, then again. Line seven, his name. The department column held the department he'd worked in for thirty years. The age column: one hundred twenty-three.
Xiao Gao glanced at his papers and said, he's eighty-three this year.
Nobody picked that up.
Ye Zhen dug out her original verification notes, checked them through, and said: no changes. Not one character.
Zhou Yansheng sat at the far end of the table and said nothing. At adjournment he passed me, stopped a beat, and said, that paper hasn't changed by a single character.
Then he walked on. The sentence didn't sound like it was meant for me.
Shen Yi stamped the reply to the urgent letter: verified. He collected the dark gray folder from the conference room, carried it under his arm, and passed through the middle of us, upstairs.
Home that evening, Nian was practicing. First page of the new piece, second week on it, half of it smooth now. When she finished she said, this one doesn't have the staccato. I said, mm. She said, pity.
I said, pity what.
She said, you always listen to that one part.
Day 231, 03:11:44, step 234. No frame.
The funeral took place in their afternoon, our evening. The television gave it three minutes: the line of mourners running down the street, umbrellas up, children carried, uniforms. The eulogy was cut to two lines — one said he had served; one said he was a father.
The camera swung to the edge of the procession. A man stood outside the barrier line, holding a cardboard sign in both hands — not a big sign, the lettering ruled out along a straightedge, one line: THE SCRIPT KILLED ITSELF.
A guard looked at him once and didn't come over. He held it up. The camera panned away, and a minute later panned back — he was still there, the sign not tilting. In the last seconds of the three minutes, the procession finished passing; he turned the sign over and lowered it. The back was blank.
The announcer read the next item. The weather: a cold wave, moving from north to south.
At the institute the next morning the gatehouse light was on; Tong was stamping — two more red characters in the duty log: no frame. The corridor light wanted a stomp. On Machine Six the curve ran flat; every day the step came up, came up, and settled back where it had been.
Sticky notes, third strip, stopped at sheet sixty-eight. I didn't peel it off and didn't start a new one. The stack was still pinned at the whiteboard's edge; the top sheet's corner had curled up a little. I pressed it flat and went to boil water. <!--NOTES-->