by Anthology
Finally I find it; the pattern in the chaos. It is not music, precisely, but it is very like it. It unlocks the terror that has tightened my muscles and I am no longer a mote in a hurricane. I am the hurricane itself. My feet stir up dust along the floor. My body moves in accordance with my will. There are no words here. There is only me and the motion, whirling in patterns as complex as they are inconstant.
Life is not the only thing that evolves. My dancing changes every day, sometimes every second, each sequence repeating or vanishing based on how well it pleases me. At a higher level in the fractal, forms of dance also mutate and die. People call ballet a timeless art, but the dance performed in modern theaters is very different from the ballet that originally emerged in Italy and France.
Mine is an endangered species in the performance hierarchy; a neoclassical variant that no one remembers, no one pays to watch, and only a few small groups of dancers ever mimic. It is solitary, beautiful, and doomed to destruction. I love it because its fate is certain. Time has no more hold on it.
When my muscles lose their strength I will relinquish the illusion of control and return to being yet another particle in the rushing chaos of the universe, a spectator to my own existence. But for now I am aware of nothing except my own movement and the energy rushing through my blood vessels. Were it not for physical limitations, I would keep dancing forever.
My brother is the one who finds me. He has often brought me here and waits with electronics flickering at his temples while I dance. I like my brother. I feel comfortable with him because he does not expect me to be anything other than what I am.
By the time I have knelt to unlace my dance shoes my parents have arrived also. They are not calm and quiet like my brother. They are sweaty from the night air and speak in tense sentences that all jumble on top of each other. If they would bother to wait I might find words to soothe their frantic babble. But they do not know how to speak on my time scale. Their conversations are paced in seconds, sometimes in minutes. It is like the buzzing of mosquitoes in my ears. I need days, sometimes weeks to sort my thoughts and find the perfect answer.
My mother is close to my face and seems distressed. I try to calm her with the answer I’ve been saving.
“No new shoes,” I say. “I couldn’t dance the same in new shoes.”
I can tell that these are not the words she was looking for, but she has stopped scolding me for leaving the house unaccompanied.
My father is also angry. Or perhaps he is afraid. His voice is too loud for me, and I tighten my fingers around the paper sack in my hands.
“Stars above, Hannah, do you have any idea how long we’ve been looking for you? Gina, we’re going to have to do something soon. She might have wandered into the Red District, or been hit by a car, or—”
“I don’t want to be rushed into this!” Mother’s voice is angry. “Dr. Renoit is starting a new therapy group next month. We should—”
“I don’t know why you’re so stubborn about this. We’re not talking about drugs or surgery. It’s a simple, noninvasive procedure.”
“One that hasn’t been tested yet! We’ve been seeing progress with the ABA program. I’m not willing to throw that away just because … “
I hear the zzzap of father’s shoulder laser. Because I have not heard the whine of a mosquito, I know that it has targeted a speck of dust. This does not surprise me. In the years since father bought the laser the mosquitoes have changed, but the dust is the same as it was millennia ago.
A moment later I hear mother swear and swat at her shirt. The mosquito whizzes past my ear as it escapes. I have been keeping track of the statistics over the years. Mother’s traditional approach to mosquitoes is no more effective than Father’s hi-tech solution.
My brother takes me home while my parents argue about the future. I sit in his room while he lies down and activates the implants at his temples. Pinpricks of light gleam across his forehead, flickering because he’s connected to the Vastness. His mind is wide, now. Wide and broadening; horizons without end. Each pulse of his neurons flares across the thoughtnets to stimulate the neurons of others, just as theirs are stimulating his.
Forty minutes later my grandparents pause by the open doorway. My grandparents do not understand the Vastness. They do not know that the drool pools at his cheek because it is hard to perceive the faint messages from the body when the mind is ablaze with stimuli. They see the slackness of his face, the glassy eyes staring upward, and they know only that he is far away from us, gone somewhere they cannot follow, and that they think must be evil.
“It isn’t right,” they mutter, “letting the mind decay like that. His parents shouldn’t let him spend so much time on that thing.”
“Remember how it was when we were young? The way we’d all crowd around the same game console? Everyone in the same room. Everyone seeing the same screen. Now that was bonding. That was healthy entertainment.”
They shake their heads. “It’s a shame young people don’t know how to connect with each other anymore.”
I do not want to listen to them talk, so I stand up and close the door in their faces. I know they will consider the action unprovoked, but I do not care. They know the words for temporal autism, but they do not understand what it means. Deep inside, they still believe that I am just bad mannered.
Faintly, beyond the door, I hear them telling each other how different young people are from the way they used to be. Their frustration mystifies me. I do not understand why old people expect the younger generations to hold still, why they think, in a world so full of tumult, children should play the same games their grandparents did.
I watch the lights flare at my brother’s temples, a stochastic pattern that reminds me of the birth and death of suns. Right now, he is using a higher percentage of his neural tissue than anyone born a hundred years ago could conceive of. He is communicating with more people than my father has met in his entire lifetime.
How was it, I wonder, when Homo habilis first uttered the noises that would lead to modern language? Were those odd-sounding infants considered defective, asocial, unsuitable to interact with their peers? How many genetic variations bordered on language before one found enough acceptance to perpetuate?
My grandparents say the Vastness is distorting my brother’s mind, but I think it is really the opposite. His mind is built to seek out the Vastness, just like mine is attuned to the dizzying flow of seconds and centuries.
Night collides into morning, and somewhere along the way I fall asleep. When I wake, the sky beyond my brother’s window is bright with sunlight. If I bring my face close to the glass, I can just see the flytrap with the magnificent blossom and the crumpled stem. It is too early to tell whether it will survive the day.
Outside the neighbors greet each other; the elderly with polite nods or handshakes, the teenagers with shouts and gestured slang. I wonder which of the new greetings used this morning will entrench themselves into the vocabulary of tomorrow.
Social structures follow their own path of evolution—variations infinitely emerging, competing, and fading into the tumult. The cathedral at the end of our street will one day host humans speaking a different language, with entirely different customs from ours.
Everything changes. Everything is always changing. To me, the process is very much like waves hitting the tidal rocks: Churn, swirl, splash, churn … Chaos, inevitable in its consistency.
It should not be surprising that, on the journey from what we are to what we are becoming, there should be friction and false starts along the way. Noise is intrinsic to change. Progression is inherently chaotic.
Mother calls me for breakfast, then attempts to make conversation while I eat my buttered toast. She thinks that I do not answer because I haven’t heard her, or perhaps because I do not care. But it’s not that. I’m like my brother when he’s connected to the Vastness. How can I play the game of dredging up memorized answers to questions that have no meaning when the world is changing
so rapidly? The heavens stream past outside the windows, the crustal plates are shifting beneath my feet. Everything around me is either growing or falling apart. Words feel flat and insignificant by comparison.
Mother and father have avoided discussing synaptic grafting with each other all morning, a clear indication that their communication strategies must once again evolve. Their conversations about me have always been strained. Disputed phrases have died out of our family vocabulary, and my parents must constantly invent new ones to fill the gaps.
I am evolving, too, in my own small way. Connections within my brain are forming, surviving, and perishing, and with each choice I make I alter the genotype of my soul. This is the thing, I think, that my parents most fail to see. I am not static, no more than the large glass window that lights the breakfast table. Day by day I am learning to mold myself to a world that does not welcome me.
I press my hands to the window and feel its cool smoothness beneath my skin. If I close my eyes I can almost feel the molecules shifting. Let it continue long enough, and the pane will someday find its own shape, one constrained not by the hand of humans but by the laws of the universe, and by its own nature.
I find that I have decided something.
I do not want to live small. I do not want to be like everyone else, ignorant of the great rush of time, trapped in frantic racing sentences. I want something else, something that I cannot find a word for.
I pull on mother’s arm and tap at the glass, to show her that I am fluid inside. As usual, she does not understand what I am trying to tell her. I would like to clarify, but I cannot find the way. I pull my ballet slippers from the rustling paper bag and place them on top of the information packet left by the neuroscientist.
“I do not want new shoes,” I say. “I do not want new shoes.”
THE PAPER MENAGERIE
Ken Liu
One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried.
Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down at the breakfast table.
“Kan, kan,” she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from on top of the fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the fridge in a thick stack.
She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious.
She turned the paper over and folded it again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded-up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it, like a balloon.
“Kan,”’ she said. “Laohu.” She put her hands down on the table and let go.
A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.
I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. “Rawrr-sa,” it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.
I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.
“Zhe jiao zhezhi,” Mom said. This is called origami.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.
Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.
One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.
He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of Mom.
I’ve never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a calm child.
“That was the last page of the catalog I saw,” he said.
The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned out to be true.
He wrote to her, and the company passed their messages back and forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her.
“The people at the company had been writing her responses. She didn’t know any English other than ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye.’”
What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought? The high school me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine.
Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he paid a waitress at the hotel restaurant to translate for them.
“She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful, while I spoke. And when the girl began translating what I said, she’d start to smile slowly.”
He flew back to Connecticut and began to apply for the papers for her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of the Tiger.
At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo out of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while Laohu chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would press down until the air went out of them and they became just flat, folded-up pieces of paper. I would then have to blow into them to re-inflate them so they could run around some more.
Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow to his heart’s content (just not in soy sauce).
Also, Laohu liked to pounce at sparrows when he and I played in the backyard. But one time, a cornered bird struck back in desperation and tore his ear. He whimpered and winced as I held him and Mom patched his ear together with tape. He avoided birds after that.
And then one day, I saw a TV documentary about sharks and asked Mom for one of my own. She made the shark, but he flapped about on the table unhappily. I filled the sink with water, and put him in. He swam around and around happily. However, after a while he became soggy and translucent, and slowly sank to the bottom, the folds coming undone. I reached in to rescue him, and all I ended up with was a wet piece of paper.
Laohu put his front paws together at the edge of the sink and rested his head on them. Ears drooping, he made a low growl in his throat that made me feel guilty.
Mom made a new shark for me, this time out of tinfoil. The shark lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit next to the bowl to watch the tinfoil shark chasing the goldfish, Laohu sticking his face up against the bowl on the other side so that I saw his eyes, magnified to the size of coffee cups, staring at me from across the bowl.
When I was ten, we moved to a new house across town. Two of the women neighbors came by to welcome us. Dad served them drinks and then apologized for having to run off to the utility company to straighten out the prior owner’s bills. “Make yourselves at home. My wife doesn’t speak much English, so don’t think she’s being rude for not talking to you.”
While I read in the dining room, Mom unpacked in the kitchen. The neighbors conversed in the living room, not trying to be particularly quiet.
“He seems like a normal enough man. Why did he do that?”
“Something about the mixing never seems right. The child looks unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster.”
“Do you think he can speak English?”
The women hushed. A
fter a while they came into the dining room.
“Hello there! What’s your name?”
“Jack,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound very Chinesey.”
Mom came into the dining room then. She smiled at the women. The three of them stood in a triangle around me, smiling and nodding at each other, with nothing to say, until Dad came back.
Mark, one of the neighborhood boys, came over with his Star Wars action figures. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber lit up and he could swing his arms and say, in a tinny voice, “Use the Force!” I didn’t think the figure looked much like the real Obi-Wan at all.
Together, we watched him repeat this performance five times on the coffee table. “Can he do anything else?” I asked.
Mark was annoyed by my question. “Look at all the details,” he said.
I looked at the details. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say.
Mark was disappointed by my response. “Show me your toys.”
I didn’t have any toys except my paper menagerie. I brought Laohu out from my bedroom. By then he was very worn, patched all over with tape and glue, evidence of the years of repairs Mom and I had done on him. He was no longer as nimble and sure-footed as before. I sat him down on the coffee table. I could hear the skittering steps of the other animals behind in the hallway, timidly peeking into the living room.
“Xiao laohu,” I said, and stopped. I switched to English. “This is Tiger.” Cautiously, Laohu strode up and purred at Mark, sniffing his hands.
Mark examined the Christmas-wrap pattern of Laohu’s skin. “That doesn’t look like a tiger at all. Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?”