There’s a faculty meeting about what’s happening, I know there is, upstairs in one of the rooms behind the library. I know that’s where Deng and Ren and the rest of them are, even though they left their raincoats in 1-B109, and Dr. Ku even left his bluetooth speaker. I deduce this from their calendars, and I post up at one of the tables outside.
When Deng emerges I will flag her down and I will finally tell her what I’m afraid is going to happen and she’ll tell me, Mona, you’re going to be all right, but you do need help. And I’ll tell her, I know I do. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all day. Thank you.
But when she does emerge, Dr. Ren immediately pulls her aside, into an alcove down the hall. I can’t make out what they’re saying — that is, until I take some quiet paces forward, and duck behind a large cart of warm, folded towels. I begin the long process of untying and re-tying my shoe.
“...should’ve taken a page out of Peter’s book,” Deng is arguing, low and insistent. “I should have taken a sledgehammer to that thing the moment I arrived.”
“It’s university property.” Ren is not speaking quite so quietly, but he casts glances around. “She’s an enormously skilled neikonaut, and she has every right to be using it.”
“I know she’s a skilled neikonaut, Ren. That’s why I brought her to Shanghai.”
Oh, I hate when she says that. You didn’t bring me anywhere, old woman.
“Anyway, the silver lining of all this is that the poor woman probably had contact with him,” Ren continues, after a beat. “And in hindsight, it’s obvious where. The Big Three want his head on a spike, so. If you need a benzo soda, and I wouldn’t necessarily blame you, consider making it at home. Is more than I should probably even say.”
“Contact?” Deng whispers. She doesn’t like the way Ren used that word, and neither do I. “She bought the egg from him!”
But Ren shakes his head. “That’s not a conclusion we can draw right now.”
They can probably see over this laundry cart. If either of them even glanced this way they would probably spot me. Part of me wants to beat them to it. Boo! Surprise! But they don’t look over. Deng, eyes locked on Ren’s, lowers her voice and mutters something irritating.
“Well if we had known, maybe so,” he snaps back. “I know. I know. But what should Mona have done? Tied him up before he could leave the clinic? And if she had, would you have agreed to speak to him then?”
“— absolutely not getting involved in this again —”
“— know far more about the Sunflower Sieve than you let on —”
“— and you’d better keep my student out of this, too, Ren, she’s not your instrument —”
“— your my instrument?” Something flares in Dr. Ren. “Instrument in what, exactly? Are you finally ready to be direct now?”
Deng says something too quietly for me to hear.
“Nobody believes that,” Ren insists. “And you’re lying to yourself if you think we have that kind of time.”
They pass out of earshot, onto the balcony just outside. That might have been the end of my skulking. Only the windows in this part of the reading room are fashioned as a great matrix of primer tiles that bathe us in slowly-shifting squares of color, biased orange by the early-evening sun. I creep through the stacks, parallel to Deng and Ren, and plant myself in the shelves, my face now plastered against what I hope serves as a one-way window.
The two are bathed in dim multicolored light from the library windows above, the wind whipping Deng’s hair. Ren gestures wildly: at her, himself, the school, the distant skyline. Deng keeps her arms folded, still gripping a crumpled paper cup. Ren pulls a manila envelope from his jacket, seems to weigh it for a moment, and hands it to Deng.
She gives him a foul look, tearing it open. She finds something soft and circular inside. She examines it for a second and then positively snarls, raising the object and using it to smack Ren back and forth across the face. Then she tries to rip it in half, gives up, and leaves it in a trash can. She storms inside. The door swings in her wake.
After Ren spends a dejected moment scrolling his wanji, after he sighs and wanders away, I creep back down the hall and onto the balcony. I scrunch my nose, fishing through orange peels and surgical masks, until I find it.
And at long last, as night is really falling, Deng and I do track each other down. I find her in her office. She wants to show me pictures of the two of us, now gracing the YINS homepage. She grins and grins and shuffles back and forth and emits lighter-than-air pleasantries that collect on the ceiling. There is a mention of Cheng Qiaoling, carefully inserted and carefully couched. The exact flavor of false reassurance that I offered Yao. The kind of mishap inevitable with scale. I just let her do her thing. Terrible manners, can I offer you some tea? Let layer after layer of the woman I could have sworn to you that I knew melt away, until it’s gears and actuators, until I see how she operates.
She’s been drinking. I can smell it on her breath, the cheap stuff, and hear it sloshing around in her thermos.
“Right.” She finally runs out of steam.“You said you wanted to talk? Somewhere quiet? I’m here. Shoot.”
I don’t know how start this. It’s no longer the same conversation I needed to have this morning. I feel for the thing in my pocket, this cursed object, this reverse-talisman, this proof-but-not-quite. I want so badly just to slap it on to the table. But I don’t know if she has the power to send me home.
“Isn’t it weird how we don’t really know each other?”
Deng eyes me over. Somehow it feels like she has an answer ready.
“There’s two things there. The first is the proposition that we don’t really know each other, and I don’t think that’s true. For instance, I may not know your favorite kind of music — and I would make a heavier wager that you don’t know mine. But I know you, Mona, in the important ways. I can tell in an instant when you’re having a good day, or when you’re feeling anxious, or when you’re upset.”
Can you, Dr. Deng? Can you hear the china in my trembling hand?
“The second is that it’s weird, that our relationship has certain boundaries. Some of those boundaries are an artifice of the PhD program. If — when you graduate, if you choose to stay at YINS, it will take on different shades. Some are mine. And please don’t take this poorly, but some of those walls are yours, and I often wonder if you even know they’re there.”
“I just.” I feel contracted, too much of me in too little space. How the diving-bell feels, I think. I try to draw a full breath; nowhere to go but inwards. “I think, given that you’re the whole reason I moved here, I — listen. Do you remember the day you asked me to come with you to Shanghai? We took a walk out by the Dish trails.”
“I remember, yes.”
“And I asked you why you left Shanghai, and you said it was a long story, do you remember that?”
“No.”
“Okay, well, you didn’t tell me. And I think back, and I’ve asked around a bit, and it turns out that almost nobody really knows why you left. Or more like, it’s the kind of thing where everyone knows, and nobody wants to say. I think I want you to tell me that story now.”
Her face clouds over. Absentmindedly she traces a line along her face with her thumbnail. “Well, since you’ve spent some time thinking about this, I bet you’ve guessed that it was political. You know when I left, and you know when Xia Zitian handed over power to, well, no one in particular.” About a third of the air goes out of the room when she mentions that name. “Secretary Xia was a bit of a geek. He had a handsome aspect, a Navy machismo, but in his heart he just wanted to play with his toys. He loved technology in the most abstract sense, in a way that only an outsider can. He really believed — well, you can see how a man like that got into the kind of trouble he did.”
“You mean with the Mirror Sea,” I offer, flat, baiting.
“That,” Deng affirms, and whoosh — another third. “Certainly that. What people don’t remember, and what I would rather allow the world to forget, is that Xia Zitian was also the first champion of neikotics. At Fudan we had been trying to build a high-bandwidth brain-computer interface for close to a decade. We knew what the missing piece was, but it was hard to say it in a voice above a whisper. Xia lent an ear. He lent the equivalent of — let’s see — about two billion in today’s yuan, and we were added to his stable of skunkworks projects. But more than the money, we had his protection. If someone starting asking about drugs or the test subjects — imagine the Stanford IRB times a hundred — they’d find out quickly that they had to go through him.”
It’s getting awfully hard to breathe in here.
“It was selfish!” Deng goes on, with half a laugh. “He got what was coming and god, yes, it was selfish of me to run from the fallout. I would have been dragged in front of Blue Delta tribunals and, well, they never managed to put many people in prison, but I worried it would have been a mortal wound in the side of neikotics. You understand that Haojie Financial was barely a twitch in Guan Zhumi’s little prick at the time.”
I have never, ever heard her talk like this. She lifts her teacup high and seems ready to offer an absurd little toast, but then she puts back the rest of her baijiu.
“So I took the show on the fucking road. I built the Japanese a scanner, and I built the Germans a scanner, and let’s see, I built the Swiss a scanner, but Peter Waldmann smashed that one up about a week later. And I built the British a scanner, and I built the Nigerians a scanner, and I resisted for a long, long time, but eventually America was in tough enough shape that I felt it would probably be fine to build them a scanner too. And that’s when I met you!”
“And that’s the story.”
“And that’s the story!” She pins me with her small and calculating eyes. “Or do you know something that I don’t?”
In the end there are a few backpedaling pleasantries and a hug that somehow turned into a handshake. And a walk that turns into a run as I reach the edge of campus, as I hit the bank of the Huangpu, as hot stupid tears pool in my eyes. Forget the help I wanted to ask for. Failed again to confront the woman in front of me. What’s wrong, Mona? Failed again to extract information or concession or confession, failed again to demand or insist or accuse. Oh, well I suppose it does look that way. Too slippery, too reflective, none of it with any referent, no hard evidence.
This is as close as I’ve ever come.
The thing from the trash, that made Deng angry. No, furious, in a way that even I have never seen. It’s a machine-stitched patch, a round and innocuous iron-on thing that you’d expect to see on a fighter pilot’s flight suit. It depicts a flower, in full yellow bloom around the edges and beady-black in the center.
Five characters crest the top edge: 上海气象局
Four characters crest the bottom edge: 葵花一号
Shanghai Weather Bureau. Sunflower 1.