[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 257, 03:11:44, step 260. No frame.
I wrote the words in that cell of the duty log, and Tong set the stamp beside them. Words on the left, stamp on the right. I had written sixty-nine cells like that one. The gatehouse's window had been refitted with new double glazing—Tong said the money had been requested for seven years running, and the no-frame stretch was when it finally got approved. When he talked, his breath fogged on the old glass. On the new glass, nothing.
After the cold snap came a steady cold. The snow in the yard lay banked on both sides of the steel plate, and the word "slow" painted on the plate had disappeared entirely. The gray car still sat buried in its old spot, snow over the tires; only a patch by the driver's door had been swept clear, by nobody knew who.
Day 258 was my shift. The companion signal work was done in the daytime; the three catalog items had been assigned pool numbers, with no objection from the stations. At eleven at night I was the only one left in the institute. The corridor's sound-activated lights were dark; the duty room's light burned.
I opened the search page of the pool's archive. Text layer. The cursor blinked in the input box.
I put my hands on it and typed two characters.
Enter.
The page sat blank two seconds, then returned one line. Zero hits.
I looked at that line. The screen dimmed itself halfway; I touched the mouse and it came back, and the zero hits were still there. Forty days of news, hundreds of hours of voice-over and captions—two characters, zero hits. There was nothing there to save. I closed the page, logged out, pushed the chair back under the desk, and turned off the light. In the corridor the sound-activated light answered with a click and came up. I went downstairs alone, my footsteps walking ahead of me.
The next day nobody knew. Search queries are logged and kept for one hundred eighty days; the log lay in the archive, shelved with the tables locked in the cabinet every night.
On day 259 Zhou didn't come. Xiao Gao handed in the leave slip for him—two days, and in the reason field, two characters: medical appointment. His chair stood empty; the group meeting ran as usual, the SC teleconference linked as usual, and none of the eleven tiles asked.
Adebayo's midday was in the canteen. His phone buzzed on the table; he watched it through the first round of buzzing, then the second, and on the third he picked up his tray and went out to take it. Two doors down the corridor, what he said didn't carry—only his voice going lower, lower, until it wasn't there. He came back and finished everything on the tray, not one grain of rice left. That afternoon the pack of cigarettes sat on the windowsill until end of shift; he took it when he went, one corner of the box caved in.
Day 261, Zhou came. He chaired the group meeting and wrote the next quarter's assignments on the whiteboard: companion subcarrier—Xiao Gao. The step sequence got its own line, with his own name on it. I was standing beside him when he wrote the two characters for "companion." The writing was a size smaller than last month; every stroke was still there, each entry and exit of the pen correct—just small. His whiteboard characters used to run one of his equal to two of mine; now it went the other way. Nobody said anything. When he finished he capped the pen. It took him two tries to get the cap on.
After the meeting he went to pour water. The pot was full; he lifted his cup with both hands. Two hands around one cup, and it was steady. He set it back down in the corner of the table, very slowly, the way you set down something else. From that day on, a stack of paper napkins appeared on his desk; he kept one under the cup, and when one was used he folded it in half, then in half again, and carried it away in his pocket.
After the meeting he stopped me in the corridor and asked, of the three catalog items for the companion signal, which had pool numbers. I told him. He nodded and said, "Proceed per the schedule." His left hand stayed in his overcoat pocket the whole time, never once coming out. The sound-activated light had gone dark, and we finished the conversation standing in the black, neither of us stamping our feet.
That evening at home, Nian was practicing, page three. There was an octave reach she couldn't make; when she couldn't make it she slid her whole body to the right, reached it, slid back—three round trips. She played it through once and asked me, did that count as done.
I said, "Two wrong notes."
She said, "Where."
I said, "Find them yourself."
She pulled the score toward her, hunted a while, found them, said nothing, and started from the top. The second time through she played both notes right, and said nothing about that either. There were a lot of things she didn't say now; the things she did say were all questions asked on behalf of someone else.
She said, "Our class is ordering workbooks for next term. Eighteen yuan. Cash."
In the morning I gave her two tens. She said she'd enter the change in her account. She has a notebook for her own accounts, wound shut with a rubber band, shown to no one.
At ten in the morning on day 263, Shen Yi came. He stood at the edge of my desk with a sheet of paper in his hand, printed, folded in four. He opened it and laid it on my desk, face up.
One line of log. Account name, timestamp, search domain the text layer, query two characters.
He asked, this is your account.
I said, "Yes."
He asked, the search domain was the text layer.
I said, "Yes."
He asked, searches outside the agenda require a report first. Did you file one?
I said, "No."
He asked, what was the result.
I said, "Zero."
He asked, why did you search those two characters?
I didn't answer. Someone went past in the corridor, the footsteps fading. He waited—a good ten seconds—then folded the paper back along its four creases.
He said, "I sat on the log for three days. I can't sit on it any longer."
From his folder he took out a second sheet. This one was official. The header was four characters: suspension pending review. The body was three lines—the first, effective immediately; the second, cooperate with the investigation; the third, pay continues as usual. It came from the institute's personnel office, the red stamp set down square and true, and the signature field was full—name, date, nothing missing. In all this time, every letter I had seen had an empty signature field. This one was full.
He said, "Three days or thirty days, that's not mine to set. Go home for now."
I signed the acknowledgment. While I signed I watched my own hand; the hand was steady, every stroke where it belonged.
The access card came off its lanyard. Photo side down, laid beside the suspension decision. Shen Yi glanced at the card and didn't reach for it; he had someone from personnel come collect it half an hour later. I packed up my desk. It wasn't much: a mug, a half-used stamp pad, two unopened packs of sticky notes, a slip of paper with my desk extension number. I put them into one of the institute's printer-paper boxes and left the box where it stood. Xiao Gao said he'd bring it over.
Going out, I passed the gatehouse. Tong stood up behind the new glass. He didn't ask. He turned the duty log to today's cell, took his pen, and wrote the two words "no frame." His writing is smaller than mine. Then he squared the book so the cell faced me, picked up the rubber stamp, pressed it on the ink pad, and stamped. Stamp on the right. Words on the left.
He said, "I'll keep writing this cell for you."
I said, "Thank you for the trouble."
He said, "This one's no trouble."
I went out the gate. The snow at the entrance had melted halfway and frozen again, and I planted every step as I walked. Old Chen at the gate nodded at me through the glass, and I nodded back, and that counted as having spoken.
Suspension keeps its own hours. Nian goes through the school gate at 7:20, and for the first time I stood in the line of parents collecting children—people who all knew one another, who left me half a person's width of space. She comes out at 3:30, and on the walk home she tallies her accounts for me: workbook eighteen, two yuan change received, the two yuan entered on the "income" page. She said, Mama, does your pay still come? I said it comes. She said, oh—then this isn't losing your job. I said, no. She said, what is it called? I said, "It's called waiting."
She asked, are you coming to collect me tomorrow too?
I said, "I am."
She said, then where will you stand?
I said, "At your school gate."
She said, there are two trees at the gate. Stand by the one on the left. Under the one on the right there's a hole—last week Wang Yuxuan's grandmother stepped in it.
I said, "The one on the left, then."
She said, "Mm."
The apartment is quiet in the daytime. The water in the heating pipes ticks along notch by notch, loudest at noon. Downstairs somebody shovels snow, pushes it to both sides, opens a path; by afternoon it has frozen over again, and the next day he shovels it again. At four in the afternoon I went once to the vegetable market, my first time choosing that hour. Half the stalls were empty and the fish was down to one; the vendor said the afternoon fish wasn't fresh, come early tomorrow. I said, I'm not in a hurry today. He looked at me, knocked two yuan off the one fish, and threw in a handful of scallions. I carried the fish home, and on the way not one person knew me, and that was a new thing. Nian saw the fish on the table when she got home from school and asked what day it was. I said, no kind of day. She said, oh. She picked up a piece with her chopsticks and said, it is a bit not-fresh. I said, early tomorrow, then. She said, fine.
I sat a while on Nian's piano bench, the keyboard lid down; I didn't lift it. I opened the middle drawer once—the notebook is there—and turned to the first page: seven lines, one through seven. I read the seventh line twice, closed it, put it back, and pushed the drawer shut. At night, when Nian was asleep, I drew my father's band log off the shelf and turned to that page: the old record's three lines, and under them the four characters I wrote last week—December 3, same. I held the page under the desk lamp a while, then closed it. Outside the window there is no signal; inside, the shelf holds row upon row of what other people wrote down across the decades, the things I can't explain, and none of them rushes any of the others.
On the afternoon of day 266, Xiao Gao came with the box. Tape wound around twice, and on the side of it he'd written FRAGILE in marker, though nothing inside was breakable. He took things out one at a time and set them on the table, his mouth out of step with his hands.
He said, "Adebayo's gone."
The notice went up on the bulletin board, just under the S-11 column, a fresh sheet at four thumbtack corners. Xiao Gao trained in text forensics can recite the body from memory: in violation of relevant regulations on research integrity and confidentiality, the institute's administrative meeting has decided to transfer him out of the research group. Date at the bottom, stamp. That was all, not one word more.
I asked, what happened?
Xiao Gao said, the betting. The outside book. It broke at his cousin's end first—they had him on the books over there, entry by entry, every date matching up. Three days ago somebody came to the institute looking for him; the gatehouse turned them away, and the person never got in. The next day the notice went up.
I asked, where is he?
Xiao Gao said, gone. The day he cleared out his desk he didn't look anyone up—only Administration. The two envelopes in his drawer, Administration couldn't work out how to classify, so they let him take them, and he took them. The nail on the wall stands empty; not one odds sheet left on it. The folder marked "wrong" he didn't take—sitting under the three-column verification table, still on the desk.
Xiao Gao set the mug down, a ring of tea stain around the bottom. He said, "I scrubbed this one. Won't come off. Don't hold it against it."
He said, when he left he asked me to say something to you.
I asked, say what?
Xiao Gao thought, then said, that was it—"say something." He didn't say what.
I said, "Understood."
Xiao Gao went on: did you hear about Dr. Zhou? I said, what about him? He said, on the back of the leave slip, the personnel office had copied one line—hospital diagnosis, Parkinson's. Just that; they copied nothing else. He's brought his medicine, three times a day with hot water. Tong saw him take it in the gatehouse, chased with hot water, the way you'd take a vitamin. The group asked whether he wanted some of the load taken off; he said, "The hand is one thing. It doesn't affect the schedule."
Xiao Gao said, the writing on the whiteboard—he erased it himself and wrote it all out again. The rewritten was still small. All of us could see it. None of us said it.
Xiao Gao stopped there. He looked at the row of things on the table—mug, stamp pad, sticky notes, extension number—like a man taking inventory, and when he finished counting he said, "Engineer Lin, at home, if you—" He didn't finish. He flattened the box, folded it, tucked it under his arm, and left. The shoe covers he'd pulled off at the door; this time they went into the trash.
I put those things away into the drawer one at a time. The mug went back at my hand, tea-stained side toward the wall.
On the night of day 269, knocking at the door, very light—three raps, a pause, three more. Twenty past eleven. Nian was asleep.
Ye Zhen stood at the door, scarf still on, a kraft archive envelope from the archive in her hand, the cord wound three times around the closure. She came in, stood at the table's edge, undid the envelope, took out two sheets, and laid them side by side—the left one printed, the right one a rephotographed old picture.
She said, "I've been through all sixty-one cards. My sister's shop, the door, across the road, under the bridge—every frame that could be looked at, I looked at frame by frame. She isn't there. Not in one."
I said, "Mm."
She pointed at the left sheet. The frame of June 2, second item of the local segment: the neighboring county's old street, a follow-up on the renovation, the camera sweeping across the main room of a family's house for one second and four frames. She had that second enlarged and printed, and on the wall of it hung a picture frame.
She said, "This is my mother's home. That frame has hung at the head of my mother's bed for forty years."
In the print, the frame held half a photograph, clear. She said, this side is my mother. She set her fingertip on the right side of the picture—the folds of the clothing all there, the frog buttons at the collar, the stray hairs at the temple, one by one.
Her finger moved left.
She said, "This side is my sister."
The old photograph lay there next to the print. February 1998, the county photo studio. The mother sat in a rattan chair, the sister standing at her left, the two of them with their hands folded together over the shoulder, the mother's hand on top. The studio man had inked a date in the corner of the negative, lightly, at a slant.
I said, "She didn't come out in it?"
Ye Zhen said, "She did."
She said, look at this part.
In the print, the left half of the frame was a slab of blur. Not a reflection, not glare on the glass, not a missed focus—the focus sat on the mother's half, clear past all sense, so that a single grain of dust on the frame's glass could be counted. The sister's half was a flat blur with nothing in it: no contour, no base color, just blur.
Ye Zhen said, "My sister isn't in any frame. But my mother is. In that day's photo, she was cropped out."
Her voice didn't rise or fall as she said it; when she finished she drew her finger back and laid it on the archive envelope. Under the desk lamp, two sheets—one photographed, one from inside a frame.
I asked, did you note the frame number?
She said, noted. She said, you're not at the institute; I know. She said, that's why I came here.
She left the old photograph and put the print back into the envelope, the cord wound three times around again. She said, there are other frames; I'll keep looking. She said, when I find them, I'll come here again.
After the door closed, the corridor's sound-activated light came up once and went out. I moved the desk lamp closer to the wall and looked first at the old photograph. Two people's hands folded together, the mother's hand on top, the knuckles thick—a hand that had done work. Outside, snow was falling, windless and very quiet; it settled on the windowsill and thickened layer on layer, and the light on the sill looked yellower against it.
I sat at the table past midnight. I didn't turn on the radio.