[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 270, 03:11:44, step 273. No frame. The steps climbing as before; neither line of those two numbers had changed.
In the fourth month of no-frame, the station's old serial finished its second rerun round and opened a viewer-request slot; Nian watched a few minutes a day and said the requests were all the same few shows, said the slot was the same as no slot. The bookstore had taken the August 1936 pages that newspaper reprinted a while back and bound them into a set—green covers, two volumes—displayed for sale by the register; plenty of buyers, more people flipping through. Tong said the gatehouse had one too, left behind by nobody knew who, and nobody had come to claim it.
Second week of the suspension. Ye Zhen came again, at night again, half an hour earlier than last time. She undid her scarf at the door, and after coming in she capped her pen first, and only once it was capped did she start talking.
She had brought three printouts.
She said, "U-003, U-004, U-005. The first two numbers are the June 2 picture frame; I took it apart and counted—the frame's left and right halves count as two entries." She said, "This is a new index. I've settled on the column name: Not Imaged." She said, "As of today, five entries in all."
I laid the three sheets out on the table. One was the frame from mid-May: old men playing chess at the lane mouth, and in the ring of onlookers one face a flat blur. One from the end of June: the woman at the vegetable market's scales, third of four in the queue, face blurred, the plastic bag in her hand clear—every scallion in it countable. One from early July: the school gate at dismissal, someone bending to buckle a child's backpack, blurred from crown to shoulder.
Ye Zhen said, "I picked these three because they all match up."
She said, "Don't misunderstand—I can't match people. The people in the frames are forty years downstream; what I can check now is people in the present, thirty-nine years between. There's no pointing at a blurred face and saying who it is. What I match is areas."
She spread the cards out and went through them one by one. The lane: half of it resettlement housing, half privately owned houses. The resettlement building's electricity is paid by deduction; on the private-house half, to this day people still carry cash to the window, which opens two afternoons a month. In the frame's chess ring, three blurred faces, every one of them positioned along the wall on the private-house side, while on the resettlement side two people stood talking by the entrance, both faces clear. The market: half its stalls had gone onto electronic scales tied into the settlement system; the other half kept a paper ledger, and I remember the market office's book—stall number, deposit, deductions, all handwritten. In the frame's weighing stretch, on the electronic-scale side, every face was a face; on the paper-ledger side, three blurs. The school gate one she could match to no one; she got one thing only: that drop-off point is the same point it was forty years ago—the point holds, and every year there is someone standing there with a backpack.
She said, "Same lane, same market, one sweep of the lens—the electronic side was photographed, and the paper side was drawn." She said, "Now I can say it: they're not absent. They're there, and it can't draw them."
As she said it she squared the three cards into a stack again. She had looked at these three for eleven days. The archive's reading machines run four hours a day; past four hours the eyes give out, and she switches to hand-copying—suspicious time codes copied onto cards, to be looked at again the next day. When the closing music played over the eleven reading stations she went home, and on the way down she checked the day's numbers one more time. Every card in the U index has five columns: frame number, time code, blur position, count of clear faces around it, remarks. The remarks column she leaves basically empty; the only time she wrote anything was on the picture-frame card, two characters: my mother.
I looked at those three blurs a long time. I said, "Enlarge them. Print-shop enlargements, the largest format. Bring them tomorrow."
The next day she brought them, quarto size, rolled and bound with two loops of rubber band. I found my father's magnifying glass; one patch of its lens has a fog spot that won't wipe off, and I turned it in my hand to use the half without the spot.
The blur's edge was a single clean line. Between clear and blurred, the switch happened inside one pixel row. Blur from being out of focus doesn't look like that—out of focus spreads slowly, a step of clear, a step of half-clear, a step of blur, the way a streetlamp looks through narrowed eyes. This had no steps. It was cut.
I wrote the first parameter sheet. Inside the blur, take the largest patch, compute the brightness distribution, plot the histogram. I said, "You run it at the institute for me. You know the machines."
Ye Zhen brought the result the next day. The histogram was flat. Not a photograph's histogram, not a screen's—the flatness that is the signal's own, level all the way through, no bulge, no dip.
I had seen that flat before. Once, back before day seventy-something. I opened the other stack of paper she'd brought: A-03, the half face, entry number three in the anomaly ledger—pending classification; histogram flat; no frame edge, no vignetting. Back then nobody had known where to file it.
I said, "File it here."
Ye Zhen took a pencil from her bag, struck a line through the first word of "pending classification" in the top right corner of A-03's page, and wrote beside it: not imaged, see U. When she finished she set the pencil down and capped it. She said, "I haven't dared strike that word in five years." She said, "Back then there was no column, and inventing a column outright frightened me worse than filing into a wrong one. Now there's a column."
Ye Zhen pulled out A-03's copy and looked at it. I looked at it too. The frame from late April, local segment, a column called "City Memory" running old archival footage—the picture showed a temple fair from a few decades back, people passing in front of the lens, and among them one person turning back, the right half of his face blurred, the left half clear, a mole on the cheekbone.
Ye Zhen said, "That stretch is old footage."
I said, "How can you tell?"
She said, "I didn't tell—Master Lu did. I took it to him and he gave it one listen. He said the picture's grain is film grain, aspect ratio four to three, and by 2079 the stations had long stopped using that ratio; the piece was dubbed off a tape, an old film. He said it's no wonder the station plays old films—the wonder is the blur."
I lined the pieces up on the table in a row. Old footage. Low-data people. A flat histogram. A clean edge.
Ye Zhen said, "In our archive, the people who restore old photographs—when a scan comes out with gaps, the computer fills them in. For the places it can't fill, they have a word."
I asked, "What word?"
She said, "Rendering."
I said, "Right. This layer it broadcasts—it isn't shot and relayed. It's drawn."
Ye Zhen was quiet a while. She set the A-03 sheet beside the three new printouts—four blurs, lined up even. She said, "Then my sister's half of that picture frame—it drew and drew, and at her it couldn't draw any farther."
I said, "Mm."
She said, "My mother, it can draw."
She didn't look at me as she said it; she looked at her mother's half of the photograph—the folds of the clothing, the frog buttons, the stray hairs. She said, "My mother's work unit recorded a set of workplace-exercise instruction tapes back in the day, the kind distributed district-wide." She said, "My sister never worked a single day. Not one."
On the afternoon of day 278 a daytime visitor came. Shen Yi—the same dark jacket, the hard-shell document case in his hand. He changed shoes at the door, and coming in he glanced at the table. The quarto enlargements lay spread out, the blurs facing the door. His gaze rested on those pictures two seconds. He didn't ask.
He had come to take my statement, the last one. The questions were all in the template: did you submit the query yourself—yes. Had I mentioned it beforehand to anyone—no. Had I retained the results—zero results, nothing to retain. Did I accept the outside-contact rules during suspension—accepted. He read one, I answered one, he wrote one. At that point he paused, then added a question not in the template. He asked, what did you do during the suspension?
I said, "Looked at photographs at home."
His pen tip held still on the paper a moment. The quarto enlargements lay spread out right there beside him, blurs toward the door; he'd seen them coming in. He wrote on, and I caught sight of the four characters he set down: rested at home. When he finished he didn't look up; he pushed the statement across for me to sign. Two pages; I signed, and the hand was steady still. When he collected it he squared the paper's corners before it went into the case.
He didn't leave right away when he packed the case. Standing at the table's edge, he said, "The companion signal side has stalled. The tail is decoded, and the stations can't push any farther back against the counting block. SC has named the one who did the differencing in the first place."
I said, "Oh."
He said, "I haven't answered them yet."
He picked up the hard-shell case and said, "You don't have to answer me in a hurry." He said, "The papers are all here with you. Whenever you want to answer, send word to the gatehouse."
He left. At the door his shoe hesitated a beat before it crossed into the corridor; his habit is to listen first for whether anyone is outside.
On day 283 Xiao Gao came by, bringing not the box but a single page. The SC session's public agenda for the following week, five items, and the third read: companion residual segment, non-Earth modulation candidate, dedicated project to be established. At the very bottom of the page, a line in pencil, Zhou's, still small: look, don't answer, look first.
Xiao Gao said Dr. Zhou said this page doesn't count as a document—it counts as a circulation copy. I said, thank him for me. Xiao Gao said he said no thanks needed; he said if you come back, the schedule comes back.
That page sat on my table, next to the blur enlargements. At night I read the pencil line again. Even strokes, every stroke where it belonged—only small. The man who wrote it holds his cup in two hands, and what he writes is still steady.
I wrote two more parameter sheets. One had Ye Zhen take a hundred clear faces from the same frame, average them, and compute the spectrum of the average face. One had her take the largest blur patch and compute the same spectrum. The two spectra, radially averaged, plotted onto one chart.
I said, "Don't take the control group from inside the frames—use our own corridor cameras. A hundred. All living people, all clear faces."
Ye Zhen brought the chart on the third day. The cameras overwrite in a loop, she said, keeping only thirty days back; of her hundred frames, one man crossed the corridor every day and accounted for seven of them. She kept one of the seven, discarded six, and made up the six from the machine at the canteen entrance. She said, a hundred is a hundred; one person can't be counted seven times. Count him seven times and the average leans toward his face. The two curves came down together, shoulder to shoulder. Random noise doesn't make a spectrum like this, and clear faces don't either—the two of them fell together, in the middle. The unseen face inside the blur equaled a hundred faces added up and divided by a hundred: features averaged clean away, one layer of base left, and the spectrum is exactly this slope.
Ye Zhen looked at the chart a long time. She said, "It took a hundred people and drew a person who doesn't exist."
I said, "It took everyone. The hundred in the corridor were only our sample."
As she gathered her cards she told me something. A man in the bindery had heard what the U index was after, and the next day he brought in a packet: his father's photographs, from every era, a small stack. He said, your index—could it enter one line for my father? So that when the time comes there isn't a blur where he is too. Ye Zhen said she told him no; the index records blurs inside frames, not the faces of the living. He asked, then where do I record it? Ye Zhen thought, and said, take them home for now. He took the photographs home, and two days later brought them back—this time rephotographed, converted to electronic copies, loaded onto a USB drive. He said, electronic ones you can take, surely.
Ye Zhen said, "I didn't take it. I said it's outside my authority." He said fine, then leave it on your desk, and don't blame him when it gathers dust. She stopped there a beat and said, that USB drive is still in my drawer. She said, "I don't know which column it goes in. I can recite every column in the archive; there isn't one for this."
Day 285 was January 1. At midnight a family downstairs set off firecrackers—four or five reports, then they stopped; they remembered something, maybe, and didn't set off any more. Nian didn't wake; she sleeps deep, had kicked a corner of the quilt loose, and I tucked it back. I sat at the table a while, thinking of today's cell in the duty log—those two words weren't written by me, they were written by Tong, whose writing is smaller than mine, the stamp still the same stamp, its "frame" still missing a vertical stroke. Cell by cell it had written its way into the new year, and what it wrote was still those two words.
After New Year's Day, Nian's piano teacher circled the two Grade 4 pieces and told her to choose. She stood the two scores side by side on the stand, looked them over, and chose the slow one. I asked why. She said, "The fast one doesn't show how good I am." She said it in complete earnestness, the tone of someone at a group meeting choosing between proposals.
In early January came her finals. The nights before she studied until nine and turned her own light off. The day after her last exam she took out the account notebook, opened the "expenses" page, and wrote one line: sweet-and-sour ribs, one meal, owed. She wrote it and showed me. I asked, who owes whom? She said, you owe me. You said you'd treat me when exams were over. I said, did I say that? She said, you did—said it in October. I remember. I said, all right, this weekend. She added two words after the line: settled.
On the night of day 290, Ye Zhen came to collect. She packed the parameter sheets, the enlargements, the cards into the archive's kraft envelope one at a time, the cord wound three times around. The last thing was the chart with its two curves; she picked it up and put it down.
She asked, "Who is it that draws this?"
I said, "I don't know."
She capped her pen and stood and said, "I'm not taking this chart back." She said, "It can stay here at your home."
She turned the chart face down on the corner of the table and weighed it with a dictionary. She said, "This place of yours is cleaner than the pool."
After the door closed I turned off the desk lamp. Snow on the windowsill; once the room went dark, that much light as the snow gave back was the thing you could see. Face down on the table, a chart, and under the chart a number—a hundred faces divided by a hundred. My father's magnifying glass lay beside it, the fog spot on its lens turned toward the ceiling; forty years now, and it is still that same fog spot, and nobody has averaged it away.