[ECHO ARCHIVE · PLAYBACK MODE · TODAY'S LAYER: 1937-08-01 · STATUS: CONSTANT SPEED, ONE LAYER PER DAY]
In the small hours of September 16 the next year I didn't sleep; I was at the institute. At 03:11:44 the step did not come. The curve ran flat, power holding at step 547, a whole day now, not a twitch. At 03:12 the layer arrived. Decoded, the date field read: 1936, August 1. We all recognized the picture. Twenty-five seconds, gray, the arc of the stadium. It had begun handing the tapes back.
Tong wrote in the duty log: playback, one layer. Then he dug through the drawer and came out with a newly carved rubber stamp, two characters, PLAYBACK, and this time not one stroke missing from the character for "play." He stamped it down: stamp on the right, writing on the left. "The NO FRAME one has retired. It can sit on the windowsill with me." "You're still keeping the SECONDMENT one." "That one I have to keep even more. The three of them in a row—that's these three years."
The television that day, in every country, the anchors saying near enough the same thing: the future has gone off the air; the past has begun. The insurance companies' notices came fastest, one line each: obituary-class data no longer updated, related products withdrawn from sale as of today. The maternity booking sheets emptied by more than half. The bridal shops' roll-up banners changed; the small-print line about avoiding inauspicious days was gone, replaced by "pick any lucky day you like." The calendar cults were gone; the people had dispersed so quietly it was as if they had never gathered. The three printed tracts still lay at the bottom of the tin cabinet at the gatehouse, still unopened. Tong had counted. Still three. "You can't open them and go on counting."
For the first week every television station on Earth fought to carry that layer. Then they stopped fighting—there was nothing to carry. From 1936 on, television as a thing broadcast two or three hours a day, and on most days a layer held nothing but a test card, a great clock face, or some actual film reel, no one knowing who it showed. The serial-followers cursed online about padding. Curse as they did, the next day they waited again. On the days there was content, the ratings ran higher than that forty-seven-minute gap ever did. The work on our layer changed with it: clock checks, logging the layer, pulling hashes. The epigraph's line about so-many-percent decoded had lost its use; the first line of the catalog changes its date daily, one square a day, empty, waiting—this time waiting on the past. One university opened a course called Introduction to Playback. You line up to get in.
September 17 came, and went. That morning we ate green beans, left over from the night before. Nian to school, me to work, the duty roster to duty. I came off shift in the afternoon and passed the Keyuan North Street crossing, stood a while by the iron plate. The paint on the character for "slow" had gone again, from the left side again. I walked over it and crossed. That evening I made noodles, a quick bowl. At handover, Tong glanced at the September 17 square of the duty log and wrote nothing in it. Neither did I. The September 17 of the year after that went the same. Nobody ever said aloud what the date was. It was just a date now. Tong's calendar has turned over to the new year; no circle drawn on it yet.
The signal arrives on time every day now, and everything it plays is the past. It has played its way into August 1937. The whole world has taken it up as a serial. People follow it daily; historians fall on it to collate their sources; the subtitle teams have re-released it in eight languages. Children watch the streets of 1936 and pick out license plates, army uniforms, street trams. At dinner tables someone is always working out the same sum: for the playback to reach the year you were born, how old will you be. They laugh when the sum is done, and go on eating. Master Lu's version of the sum is the shortest: "By the time it reaches 1987, my bones will have gone to crumbs." He said it wiping down his open-reel deck, wiping slowly. Of all those old radios on windowsills, most have been switched off. On a few streets they're still on—whole streets of them, turned into the street's habit; a household that switches one off gets a knock from the neighbors asking why. The price of a Red Lantern has come back down, more slowly than it went up.
Over the year a good number of people left the institute, and a good number of new ones came. Every new résumé carries the same line: participated in the Echo Project. They missed the discovery, missed the instruction page; what they arrived in time for was all playback. One of the new ones asked me, what was it like those first two years. "The files are all there." "I mean, what were you like?" I thought. "Thinner than this."
The inventory finished this spring. Every decoded item now sits public on open shelving; thirty-seven stations each keep a copy; the originals belong to us. Shen Yi runs the storeroom. Every page he ever sat on is on those racks, bound in one separate volume: the receipt for the conclusion page marked unsent; the S-31 kraft envelope; the incoming-outgoing records pressed under for upward of four hundred sixty days; his own approval slips, numbered like everything else. The first page is a photocopy of the conclusion page, the footer word "unsent" traced around in outline. My search log is not there—auto-deleted over a year before; the destruction record is on file, and under the file number the signature line carries a program's name. He bound that page into the volume too, three pages away from the S-31 envelope. A reporter came to ask him which time he regretted most. He stood beside the racks. "It's all in the register." The reporter waited for more. No more came. Of the young people who come to copy files, the steadiest one comes every week, copies two pages each time, and they are all out of the DV volume. Shen Yi knows him, and when he comes he sets the DV volume at the seat he always takes. Once the young man asked: if you had sent it, back then. Shen Yi thought. "There was no back then." The young man didn't follow it. He didn't explain. He walks people through file pulls, stands by while they work, logs it when it's done, and sees them out the door. The first thing he does on opening up each morning is dehumidify those racks. Twice.
A new division opened in Ye Zhen's archive, the label printed, two characters: ABSENT. The first file in it is her sister's. Card, cover, number; her sister's name on the first line. The category field she thought over a long time, and she did not write "Other"; she wrote "Present." The sixty-one white cards went into the glass case, laid in by her own rules, the ones with the most entries in front. The bookbinder father's photograph, the refilmed one, found its place at last too, on the shelf next to the U index; the slot that used to be a finger wide is full now. She divided it into three layers: unrendered, specimen, absent. No gap left between the three. I asked her why she wasn't leaving the gap anymore. "They're all in use now." Every two months she goes to the neighboring county. Her sister's curtain shop is still open; the sign never changed; the payment code her sister learned, and it's stuck to the glass. The key-press machine still sits on the counter; its paper roll has been changed once. The sisters don't speak of frames, of the table, of the archive. Her sister has asked her exactly once whether work was busy. "Not bad. Freer than the last two years." Last winter her sister asked once: that thing of yours—it's really over? "It's over." Her sister made a small sound and didn't stop what her hands were doing, and after a while said: "That's good." That day the two of them ate noodles in the shop, the pot set up beside the sewing machine. The modem still has power; this time her sister plugged it in herself, to watch television dramas. The table headed "Backfill" has gone into the archive too, thirty-one rows, and at the end she added one small line of her own: this table records thirty-nine days; nothing added since.
Adebayo's meeting runs every Wednesday. The one in that southern city, the Spoilers Anonymous one, eight o'clock, online. Xiao Gao's phone sits propped on that wall-side table in the canteen—the one where nobody would sit with him and he faced the wall alone. Anyone can sit down; sitting is optional. Most of the hour nobody talks, and when the hour is up it disperses. I passed once and heard him say, into the phone: "Didn't bet this week. Don't want to bet next week either." Just that, and a long quiet, and then a voice said good. His hair has gone properly white, white that looks kept. The antenna work has thinned this year; the rooftops that needed them are done. Someone at the meeting asked what he'd do from here. "South. Then further south. There's always some household that hasn't got one yet." The message he once entrusted to Xiao Gao for me has never been delivered. Xiao Gao says he forgot. I'd guess he didn't. Let the message stay where it is. Every Wednesday, ten minutes early, Xiao Gao wipes that table and props the phone up. I asked him once what he got out of it. "Nothing. Wednesday night, there has to be a table there."
Zhou retired this year. A month before he did, Master Lu retired too, and Zhou went to see him off, carrying a box of blank tape—the box the old lady's son left, the one marked Summer '94. The two of them loaded it onto the open-reel deck and recorded no voices. Zhou pressed the record key; it took three presses before it landed. What they recorded was the environment of an afternoon: the corridor's sound-activated light, the drip in the washroom, Machine Six's fan, someone downstairs wheeling a bicycle, the chain ticking. A whole side of it. Master Lu took the tape away. "I'll keep this one. It collects environments. I'll collect a little too." The unlabeled box they played. English lessons came out: a child reading aloud, going wrong, a woman beside him saying, once more. The child read again, went wrong again—the same words again. At the ninth minute the side ran out. When it finished, the old lady said: "That's him as a boy." That was all she said.
The day Zhou's retirement paperwork cleared, he came to the institute to turn in his credentials. The photograph was newly taken; the man's hands are out of frame, and there is no telling whether they shake. He called me out to the corridor and handed me one thing: the discrepancy table, the two versions of September 17, out of his drawer, where it had been locked for over a year. "Archive it. This page has earned its shelf." I logged it in. Ye Zhen's transcription page I handed over the next month; it sits in the same volume as the discrepancy table. He didn't take the elevator when he left. He took the stairs, each step one step.
At noon Lao Song still takes that old phone out and powers it on once. The screen lights; top left, three characters: NO SERVICE. He looks, closes it, puts it back in the drawer. The cancellation receipt he keeps, tucked into the phone case. Nobody asks what he's looking at.
The postcards still come, one a month, the postmark still the nineteenth. Tong lines them up at the end of the windowsill row, a little apart from the three rubber stamps. "This person has more patience than the whole lot of us." He has never written back, and doesn't mean to.
The whiteboard he didn't take with him; it went to the institute. The new people don't know what was written on it, and use it for the class schedule. Once, passing, I saw a half line of chalk under the schedule that hadn't wiped clean; there was no telling what it had said. I didn't wipe it, and I haven't mentioned it to anyone.
The two versions of September 17 still sit side by side in the library, frame numbers ending in four and in five, there for anyone to pull. The year of the inventory, a letter came from the archives asking whether to annotate them "expired." I sat on the letter a week and answered with two words: don't annotate. For a thing to lapse there must be a date it took effect, to lapse against. They don't have one. In a whole year, hardly anyone has pulled those two entries, and I haven't pulled them once. Which version counts—I've kept company with that question for two years now, and we've become neighbors: we don't visit, and neither of us has moved away.
My list is in the middle drawer of the writing desk, under the reading glasses. Eight lines, and the eighth still empty. One of them has its answer already, in fact—the front tooth came in, long and crooked, like her grandfather's. Her dad's teeth are crooked too. I didn't strike that line out. Striking it out would close the account, and this account doesn't need closing. The "My Ideal" sheet is still tucked in her account book; the rubber band on it is a new one. Once, tidying the desk, I knocked the book and the paper slid half out. I pushed it back with two fingers and wound the band down, twice around. A Good is a Good.
On the evening of September 17, Nian brought out the score of the "Twinkle Twinkle" Variations and set it on the piano. She passed this piece two years ago; the certificate stands on her bookshelf, and the Level Four certificate has come too; she stacked the two of them, edges lined up even. "I haven't played it in ages. Who would I play it for?" She looked around the room and saw the Red Lantern on the low cabinet. She switched it on and tuned it to 7.2 megahertz: static, no station—nearly two years now, and never a station. "This one, then." She played it from the top, and in the third bar the staccato still came down heavy. "Still heavy," I said. "My teacher gave up on that ages ago. I just like it this way." Somebody once gave her a way to play it: as if someone were rising onto tiptoe. Whether she rose onto tiptoe I couldn't tell you. The radio went on sounding its static from first bar to last and never once cut in. When she finished she closed the score and set it with the certificates.
Before sleep she asked me what there'd be for breakfast. "Congee. With millet in it." "Mm." Nothing more was said.
At night I couldn't sleep, got up for water, and on the way turned the Red Lantern on again. Out of the static came suddenly another sound, a woman's voice, reporting numbers. One. Two. Three. I stood where I was. Four. Five. Six. I turned the volume up a little. Seven. Then it stopped, and an accordion came in, far away, as if through water. I waited for the numbers to come round again. They didn't. I sat down in front of the low cabinet and heard the accordion out, then took the band log from the drawer, turned to the line below my father's old entry, and added one line: September 17. Same. Stops at seven. The writing very small. I didn't go looking for where the station was, or what station, or why seven. Some accounts don't need closing. Some numbers don't need checking.
I'm forty years old. What comes after, I no longer know any of it. Which year the sickness, which year the aging, which day. Piled up together, the not-knowing turned out to be light. The year before last, when it pressed down on me, I carried it to bed with me every night and never knew I was carrying it.
The signal arrives on time every day, and everything it plays is the past. Humanity finally has a serial of history that updates one episode a day—and everyone knows the ending, because we survived.
