Tethi talks about the Chalk in terms of tides. I already knew about the way it pulls people in — I’d heard less about the symmetrical way it pushes people out, sometimes just as violently, sometimes after taking years. I have to take him at his word that the triple points are the shallows: where you go in, where you come out. He says the locals from adjacent wards even come to their night market. You tend to imagine Chalkers living hand-to-mouth on stolen mangoes and penicillin. But you also hear of hospitals and riverbed submarines. Stories of the eerie effortlessness with which they feed and clothe the all-comers who fall through the cracks beneath the cracks. That takes money, which takes hustlers slumming it at the event horizon, like Tethi and Min.
I find Triple Point even spookier in the daytime: the black tarps everywhere, the stale and humid air, the last of the cicadas. For all the abandoned businesses, there is motion on the fringes of everything. Chalkers have ways of being seen only in the periphery, in vague generalities, after the fact. Sometimes I’ll get inside Old New Prosperity before an accumulation of sights and sounds and smells crashes over me: the street had been bustling, practically thronged, with people. I try to stitch these impressions along their usual edges, to recall who or what I had seen out there. But they fit together in a different way than usual. They fit together along grooves made of coincidence and repetition and correlation and —
The chime of Min’s door dispels this dark, warm, and wavy undercurrent, and brings me back into frame. I already can’t remember it, and surely that should at least be familiar? But no: loop-lock memories are gaseous and diffuse, trappable in tiny pockets. This is liquid, heavy, swirling down the drain. It was not a visual or audible sensation. It was certainly not a smell. But for a moment it took everything I had to give.
“Your face!” Tethi is laughing, but as though to draw me into the joke, to make it funny instead of scary. “Don’t let it build up like that. And anyway, it won’t last long indoors.” Lips pursed, clearly reluctant to lay bare any mechanics: “Out of view of the cameras.”
Indeed, the only Chalkers I ever really encounter are the ones who come into Min’s shop. Their errands bring them careening in with purposes they can no longer name or articulate. She makes them dry off in a little nook, where scalding tea and sweet cakes help snap them into their own senses. Then she primly reminds them that she sells cable and cameras, sell being the operative word. Others don’t cooperate: they burst in and stride up to the counter in perfect unison and demand things in a language not even Tethi can understand. They give off the horrible sense that, behind their onyx-dark Contecs, something alien watches us through their parallax. One of two things will happen here: Tethi will jump the counter, brandish a buzz baton, insist they leave. Or Min will invite them to stay.
It’s only when she offers me a bunk of my own that I realize just how many people are staying in the back of the store. Many are on their way out of the Chalk: I can tell by the convalescent half-glaze of their gazes, the introductions that mix up I and you. But more and more, they’re on their way way in. There are the runners-from, fleeing raw losses or deep debts and seeking only obliteration. Then there are the runners-to, jaundiced with screen-lust, feverish with desire for the real Sea, marshaling the courage to take those last few steps. They linger, for a night, or a week or — I’m beginning to piece Tethi’s story together, despite his best efforts — in one case a year, becoming useful, never quite getting around to leaving. Min offers what she can to all of them without judgement. And it doesn’t appear to strike her as strange in the least, when I show up again and again, at gradually odder hours, always with bags of goods pilfered from the YINS Neikotic Engineering floors.
I like Min. She never says much, but I like the incense she burns, the meticulous way she dusts, the cable bouquets she makes out of some compulsion. I like watching her and Tethi exchange their quiet affection. But I wonder about her.
One night she turns to me and raises an eyebrow. “Watch the counter?”
She pulls on a coat and leaves. When, exactly, did this happen? Maybe it was last night, when she pulled us out of Tethi’s room, away from our little assembly line, and served us heaping portions of fish soaked with lemon and ginger. Maybe it was the day before that, when I helped them gut a busted trash collector to extract one pricey little coil. Or the day before that, when Min and Tethi together listed twelve songs containing the word California — in English, Mando, and Korean all three, as my face went darker and darker red. It has been…exactly how many days?
All I know is I don’t mind it here. It’s quiet in a way that YINS can never manage, its walls always humming with current and coolant. The Chalkers largely hold the Sea in their hearts, in deep wells of quadratic belief, and there are relatively few Mirror Sea displays around Triple Point. The lack of jump scares on those screens is relief I didn’t know I needed. The work we’re doing is grueling, yeah. My fingers are burnt with hot plastic and solder and the shock of stray couplings. Tethi is a maestro; there are layers and layers to even simple neikotic devices that I will never again take for granted. He would do well at YINS — no, he will do well. Only he may have to convince me to go back with him.
But I can’t stay forever, and the reminder comes in the form of three Chalkers who burst through the door, late past sundown. That tends to mean trouble, and I grip the worn yellow handle of the buzz baton under the counter, completely unsure if I’m capable of using it. They stride up to the counter in their face paint and rags and —
“Did you fix it?” The smallest of them shouts past my shoulder to Tethi.
And with that, a certain illusion dissipates. These are young teenagers, barely past the age where the Weather Bureau stops trying to snatch you back out of the Chalk, reasoning that you’re old enough to make your choice.
“I thought you guys weren’t coming back,” Tethi tells them, overly morose. “I traded it for a pallet of teleromase smoothies.”
“We said we were coming back,” says the small one. As he dries off I clock that his Mandarin comes with a thick North Korean accent.
“We got caught up moving a choir-bubble south-ways,” insists the tall one. She sounds Nigerian, reed-skinny but already taller than Tethi. “Tough wards. Hard to know where you’re going once you’re in it. You know how it is.”
“You know how it is,” agrees the small one.
Tethi blinks once and then breaks into a shit-eating grin. “I am just fucking with you guys. Of course I fixed it.” He leads them to the second storeroom and pulls a clamshell case off a high shelf with a grunt. “Refilled the fog, too.”
I lean in the doorframe, highly amused, as he pulls a children’s quasigram projector, a rubbery green spherical thing, from its foam lining. “OUR SOLAR SYSTEM,” booms the speaker, when he flicks the switch.
“I’ve seen this one,” the small one complains. He flips through some presets:
“THE MILKY WAY GALAXY —”
“THE AMAZON RAINFOREST —”
“THE GOBI DESERT —”
“THE PACIFIC REEF BUILDERS —”
“THE MIRROR SEA OF SHANGHAI —”
“You guys,” Tethi insists. “Why don’t you watch something else for once.”
So two of them try slingshotting probes around the sun. The third one — well, I can’t precisely pin him down. That particular Chalker here-nor-thereness hasn’t worn off since he stepped out of the cameras, and he says nothing, reacts to little. Soon Tethi pulls him aside, down the hall, into his own room. He shoots me a look, and then another one, and only then do I understand he means me to follow. When the young Chalker is seated in his office chair, he asks, “you didn’t come for the projector, did you?”
The Chalker boy tries to speak and produces only round little whispers. Tethi offers him various little stimulations: a piece of chocolate, a stress ball, and eventually, reluctantly, a bright white LED to the eyes. “Are you in there? Do you have your name?”
“It’s Liu Jun,” he finally replies, with the knife-edge of a question. He goes on, low and hoarse. “They want to be here, that’s all I know. Even when I’m hours off the street, even when I’m all the way across the...” He equivocates between city and Sea. “I feel them tugging me this way. Even so close, they only tug harder. They’re coming in numbers. I think they’re waiting for something, something that hasn’t happened in a long time. Please, Tethi Okeme. You told me the story of Mo Du and the Map of the Map. You showed me how to read the Signs That Still Remain, how to See The Same Thing Twice.” He grasps for Tethi’s sleeve. “You must know something?”
Tethi’s low sigh is an elegy; his forehead arches in monument to a life no longer recalled. He lets the question fade, and then makes himself sound reassuring, like a good clinician. “You should stay here, just for a few days, until they clear out. Min can find you a bunk. Remember yourself, Liu.” But the hour passes, and Liu leaves with all the rest, looking back apologetically as the door chimes shut.
“What does this mean?” I share a long, grim look with Tethi. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I miss Yao.
“It means we’re going to need more headsets.”
I stay very late that night. The hours run together, the way things at Triple Point tend to do. I’m still soldering well past midnight. My tongue is between my teeth, my hand steady, running liquid metal over tiny pins.
“You’re going to need a CV,” I say too loudly, too suddenly. “For YINS.”
Tethi nods approvingly at my soldering work. Hands me the next board in exchange. “What?” He processes this a moment later. “Oh, very true. Thanks.”
“You’re going to need to account for the years,” I go on, head in the fumes again. “You say you’re not a Chalker. Fine. I believe you. But just how much time have you spent in there?”
He flicks a switch and the visor-screen in his hands goes dark. He turns the music down, hears Min puttering around just outside, and then turns it up even louder. “I don’t like talking about it.”
“I understand.”
“I can’t talk about it. It is categorically and precisely not possible to talk about.”
“If this is going to work, I need more than that.”
He knows I’m right. He scoots his chair, cracks his knuckles. “I told you why I came to Shanghai?”
“Yeah,” I reply softly. I mean, only kind of. Only in broad strokes, through tears. His father was one of the architects of the Gabonese Fork, and Tethi fled for his life. The details fill themselves in, and they aren’t pretty.
“I wanted to train as a neikonaut. And I was stupid enough to think that Suowei owed me something. That they’d have a clue in the world who I was. None of that worked out.” He holds up a freshly assembled headset now. “This. There’s a reason this came to mind. This was the work I was able to find, selling rave gizmos outside clubs and parties. People would fuck with you. Mostly they were harmless, but out there you’re always on someone else’s turf. One night, I stepped on the wrong toes. They took my pushcart and left me in a very bad state. Left me to die.”
I stow the soldering iron.
“The thing is,” Tethi goes on, “I had no home ward. And when you have no ward alignment — you know which hospitals are going to treat you? Without a fuss, without getting the bluelights involved? Chalker hospitals. They peeled me off the ground. I recovered, and then made myself useful. I...god. I wish I could put it into words, I really do. Five floors and a thousand eyes. The way the wind blew through the whole building at once, how that felt...” He falls silent, looking happy about something distant. It makes me glad to see him like this. “People like to say the Chalk steals people, so as not to admit that their friend or their kin made the choice. You always make the choice.”
I press. “And you make the choice to leave?”
“Well, Min took me in.” He pauses. This percolates. “Listen, I get it. If I found a mind-spanning megastructure with a twin in the Mirror Sea...” Tethi waves his arms expansively. “If I saw the Ripples were building something, I wouldn’t go to YINS for answers. I’d go to a Chalker.”
“Teth...”
“But I am choosing to leave this place.” He enunciates every syllable, sliding it under the music. “I need YINS to take me seriously, and that starts with you. Can you do that?”
Can Deng do that? I’ve batted this question back and forth every night, trying to sleep. In some of my little hypnagogic puppet shows, she welcomes Tethi with open arms. At last, she implies, a student worthy of my brilliance. Other times, I’m the cat and he’s what I dragged in. Mostly I turn that patch over and over in my hands, and I sit with the fact that there’s something I’m missing.
“Mona? Can you?”
“Yes. Yes. Of course I can.”
It’s earnestly chilly when I finally head out just a few hours before dawn. I pull my jacket on, turn my collar up against the wind that makes its way up the block. It plays the tarps and tents of Triple Point, heavy flapping and low whistles. There’s something going on in there. The thought is harmlessly vague against the logistics of getting home. There are people going in there. Lone men, whole families, with their pushcarts and shopping bags. My blood runs dense and hot, watching them turn that gentle bend into the heart of Triple Point. Tethi did mention something about a night market.
The Chalkers have what people need: vegetables and painkillers and pads. They have what people want, too: hot youtiao and lily-waft perfumes and little cartridges with three hundred hits of 4-AcO-MET. But much of what they have is not so easy to judge as vitamin or vice, necessity or nicety. You won’t know in the moment, or for many months, why it drew your eye, why it was pressed into your hand. Your money is no good in there; you just need to be brave enough to step inside. I scan the faces that pass me, inscrutable in the dark. I wonder how many are looking for a totemic seedling of a new life, and how many just need to eat.
And when I’m brave enough to step inside, sensation accumulates. Hot oil and and ripe fruit and pungent betel-nut linger long past the stimulus, myelinating the walls of my mind. No chatter, no laughter, no barter. Precious little light: of tiny, scrolling, monochrome displays, of blue-gas burners, of waxing moonglint on waxy mangoes. The lack is lucid. The mind finally free to consider rustling plastic, cool wind, the hundred different smells of shoes. No deliberation, no thinking twice. Decision, purchase, exchange, all made with loaded glance and portent gesture, objects simply taken, offered, swapped sight unseen in newspaper and twine. These thicken and blur into currents of exchange striated with desire and preference and ability and need, but whose? Just whose?
Above me, those red pinpricks, rubytears of blind eyes, the hum of the joy of uncountable new constellations, finally, a sky willing to watch back...
It takes on all the richness I let it. Glints spicedense and cherrydeep, abundance offered from all to all, wretched twice-salvaged toys, dice, rice, stationery, batteries, genzhe globes, a bewildering array of ferrous powders, the abstraction and extrusion of treasure, the glint of possibility and synchronicity, the bellyfelt goldmelt annealing of need and have into unfurling, expansion, pure motile force, the deep assurance that there is enough, so take, and give, and take again, don’t be so bashful of what you are, for even the stars are the raw fact of consumption, and there’s no need to look down upon the stars.
Above me the near-full moon, its distance lonestrange face humming and golden, its tendrils expanding over the fundamental, rich, warm, darkness of —
No, over this street, over the rustle of the ginkgos! Over the aftertastes in my mouth, over the weight in my hands! Over the sudden terror of trying to balance on two legs! And I am out the other side, turning over the intricate coincidence in my hands, the abstract way-thing, the color-flush hyperobject in this plastic shopping bag, the mingled relief and loss as I forget what I was meant to do with it, as it resolves into constituent pedestrian parts, into scissors and shave-gel and amphetamine drink-mix, and marble-sized prime-numbered voxelite buddhas, and a nearly intact conch shell, and a do-it-yourself dental kit. And a thumb drive labeled Summer Vacation. And six colors of felt-tip pen. And hundreds of Thai bhat in loose, jangling coins. And chamomile tea.
I take it all home. I can’t bring myself to throw it away.