A YEAR AGO IN SPRING

The Yangtze Delta Orthogonal Zone was to China what California had become to the United States. Great powers inside great powers, doves growing fat in the bellies of hawks, surprise twins. Neither wanted war. More to the point: neither wanted to be militarized, to be made a target for the other. Both the blue delta and the golden coast had wriggled and convulsed right up to the brink of sovereignty. Both now dangled from their motherlands by tense threads, the parallels uncanny, the details a mess. In San Francisco, in bombed-out China Daily newsboxes, I saw the name Xia Zitian again and again in three-inch print. I understood that in Shanghai the fiasco with the cameras had tipped the balance somehow.

Back home we tried calling our double defection the Shanghai-California Mutually Assured Security Arrangement. On TV they gleefully pronounced it shikamasa, like a foreign word, or a shaken maraca. The English translation of the Mandarin name is worse, though. It was a big day at the networks when they got ahold of CASH Axis. But I was grateful. It was Deng who invited me to Shanghai, but it was SHCA-MASA that arranged my position at YINS, my passage across the Pacific, and a very favorable ward alignment. In exchange for a few hours a week manning the front desk of the Neikotic Safety clinic, I would have the run of the city. I could go anywhere.

But mostly I just stayed at home.

I didn’t understand this fractured city of twenty million. My Mandarin was more brittle than I thought, my Shanghainese nonexistent. And I had bet my whole life on the whims of one singularly strange woman, whose reputation preceded me everywhere I went. Other students eyed me up and down, hoping to see the glint, whatever possessed Deng Jinghan to keep this California girl in tow. Professors were less impressed, but they treated me as a proxy, hopeful or afraid that whatever they let slip would make it back to her.

Deng was right, in the way that Deng is always right: the machine back at Stanford really was a bucket of parts compared to even a five-year-old Glider, and I was happy to leave behind that low-res, retro version of tilespace. But I was forever trying to catch up, to the new depths of the new tech, to the new twists in the new math, trying to hunt down whatever insight I could and drag it back to waking life. 

I spent most of my first year in loop-lock. I think most of us did. They warned us that it sharpened precise thought down to the razor’s bloody edge, how afterwards even dealings in grocery lists and dinner plans would leave us with these deep and tender mental rends. Math is supposed to be a universal language, I suppose, but the study guides we shared around were worse than useless, bastard chickenscratch pidgins, blueprints for cloud-castle cities that no one else could really see the shape of, much less visit.

Except, I couldn’t help but notice, at the Neikotic Safety clinic.

It was my little island of lucidity, our escape hatch back into physical, embodied relief. I liked the way people smiled down there. First I was a receptionist, then a frequent patient — nevermind that daily inversion might have been damaging my brain as much as my sloppy loop-lock math — and by the end of my first year, I was a rodentious hanger-on with an embarrassing surplus of shift credit. I made myself useful however I could, coy about why: I wanted to work the other end of the Deng Bridge, the machine my advisor once quietly invented and now loudly reviled. I needed someone other than Deng to show me how.

I opened. I took triple shifts, skipped lecture to read light novels with my feet up on the reception desk. I closed. I was at YINS a year before the undergraduates, and a temporary excess of student housing sat idle in Beiwan Ward. They gave me a tiny student flat to myself, and told me that I had three semesters to find more permanent digs. The whole first year, I barely furnished the place. I slept on the futon, and I’d wander into the empty bedroom for its view of the skyline. I’d curl up on that cold concrete floor, one earbud tuned into an emergency radio app.

I'd hear strange things, on the far side of midnight, that in the static I could only half-understand.

I was badly lonely and hurting for company. And yet I had failed to even look for a new place to live, on account of this typically involving some, you know, some amount of talking to strangers. Deng’s wild hair was that I should become a resident advisor, which in my mind was to dispense sleep hygiene advice and powdery condoms and trig identities to mainlander teens whose parents were the kind of rich that grew YINS new wings. She harangued me about this well past the deadline, and I let her. Privately I was warming to the idea of a sit-up capsule-bunk for migrant workers an hour outside the city.

With three days to move-out, with undergrads now encroaching in the lobby, I began my search for a sublet. Or a shared room, or an air mattress, or a corner of the bike shed. I winced through the slimmest of pickings. I dropped my filters — price range, radius, private room — and then set them again in ritualistic sub-combinations, casting around under the floorboards of Boolean logic. I was desperate. I had nobody to blame but myself.

I had no option left but the one at the other end of the hall.

She was a student in some other program. I think third year at the time, but the way she walked into rooms, sometimes seemed to walk through walls, it all seemed calculated to convince you that she had tenure. I knew her mostly as a silhouette, as a source of muffled Ulanbataar prog-shag, blue light leaking from a doorframe, and large groups of strange people lingering in the hallway we shared. And the way I thought of her, none of it was fair: she knew my name, I knew hers, and she’d smile at me in the elevator. But she had something that made her seem larger than she was, some layer of dazzle camouflage that made me feel like prey.

What Dr. Ren told me is that he’d tried advising her for a semester, or something like that, until her interests had drifted into the theoretical. As the two of us refilled jars of cotton swabs, he explained the situation I’d observed down the hall hall: she had moved into a double suite before YINS had administrators to tell her otherwise. It was just the kind of thing she did. Admin had been trying to move her for years, but seemed tacitly to buy into her eternal premise, which was that she simply outranked them. Dr. Ren explained with a roll of his eyes that the compromise was that she’d take on a roommate, however reluctantly, at the beginning of the next semester. Word was, she was having a hard time finding one.

Was I interested?

No. I was terrified. I was terrified when I finally sent the e-mail, finally closed the computer and dragged myself off the futon. Probably a little red in the face by the time I made it down the hall and forced myself — and I do mean forced — to knock three times on her door.

And then again, thrice more. I held my breath and counted down from ten.

And then again, just one more —

“Yeah?” Her voice, the few times I’d ever heard it, sounded always on the verge of a cold.

“It’s Mona. From down the hall?”

“Yeah?”

I sighed. “I’m here for the other room.”

There was a long pause, and then she let me know the door was unlocked.

I found her sprawled all the way across the length of a paisley wine-sprite sofa, wrapped wholly into a microfiber blanket, sleeping off something otherworldly. She winced at the light through the front door, and again when I drew back a curtain to let in a sliver of sunlight. Rising sarcophagus-style from her heap of blankets, crawling the coffee table with a splayed and bony hand for a bottle of eye drops, she let me know that she had been expecting me. “All of that will come out,” she affirmed hoarsely, as I wandered into the second bedroom. “Just haven’t gotten around to it.”

After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I realized that all of that was rack upon rack of costumes. Cloaks and skirts and jumpsuits and gauzy headdresses, all covered in visual-tactile fixpoint patterns: some like cauliflower-floret half-spirals, some like a fluorescent crab-claw cloverfield, some like a herd of zebras melting into a flock of birds. Such patterns are like visual velcro, millions of tiny fishhooks, and everybody in Shanghai knows what they’re used to catch. Plenty of people even own a fixpoint cape or a hoodie or two; many fewer actually know how to use them. This here was the arsenal of a professional.

“You’re a Ripplechaser?” 

She was up and about by then, scarfing down mantou bites and refilling her vape with a chemical I was pretty sure I’d seen PSAs about on the metro. She lifted a headphone from her ear and tinny music spilled out. 

“A Ripplechaser! You, ah —” 

She cut me off with a finger to her glossy lips. Shhh. As in, duh. 

This was how I came to live with Cai Duofan.