The Dog

by Jack Livings

  By the end of the week, Office Nine had selected a final design, trapezoidal, bearing a striking resemblance to the shape of naturally occurring quartz crystals, not unlike a military structure, perhaps a pillbox on a beach or the hardened airplane hangars some of the workers would have recognized from their time on bases in the south. Three long panels for the sides and top, and two smaller panels for the ends. These would be the largest single slabs of fused crystal ever cast in the People’s Republic. Zhou tried not to betray his worry about the larger slabs, as big as doors, thick as medical texts, unfathomable dimensions. Unachievable. Impossible. He struggled to maintain correct morale. For ten years, his research had focused on lenses—discs of crystal the size of the bottom of a drinking glass. Now this. It was not a problem of science but of time. He’d been directed to transform a pile of flour into a baked loaf of bread, and he’d been given two minutes to do it.

  Over the coming weeks the teams struggled, and they suffered. They sang revolutionary songs and chewed ginseng root to stay awake. They sucked in the dust and fumes, they sweated, and they failed.

  They failed every day in September. The night of October 1, they climbed to the roof of the factory to watch the National Day fireworks over Tiananmen. Did the lights in the sky, “The Internationale” pouring from the factory’s loudspeakers, the clear fall air revive their flagging spirits? Perhaps some, but Zhou Yuqing hardly saw or heard any of it. His mind never left the workshop. When the show was over, he followed his comrades down the stairs and got back to work. Later, he confessed to Gu Yasheng that he feared they’d leapt from a plane without their parachutes.

  “Perhaps the ground will be soft,” Gu said.

  October was a failure. By November, Team One had succeeded in producing only two patties of the required thickness. Their clarity was, at best, 90 percent. Trace amounts of calcium, sodium, magnesium, and iron fouled the mix, and short annealing times created bubbles. Every day brought a new disaster. The silicon tetrachloride furnaces shattered with alarming regularity, releasing clouds of toxic vapor into the workshop that doubled over even the toughest technicians.

  There were flash fires—fabric, sheets of notepaper, anything combustible left near the furnaces ignited. Everyone sported burns, from fresh white furrows to late-stage menisci pulling tightly at the skin. Exhausted, they fell asleep at their stations. They all wore bruises and cuts. They smashed their fingers in furnace lids and walked into low-hanging ductwork.

  Sleeplessness made them sloppy. Technician Du, changing out an empty hydrogen cylinder, failed to completely close the valve, allowing the remnants of the tank to bleed into the hot workshop air. The combustion cracked like a gunshot. Everyone, by then well conditioned, hit the floor. After a moment, they rose, dusted themselves off, and went back to work. Aftershocks from the Tangshan quake rattled the workshop every day, agitating the barrels of Cooking Oil, setting the furnaces clanging. They carried on.

  Failure. Endless failure. If their task had, in fact, been to bake bread, nearly two months after starting they’d still have been trying to figure out how to sift the flour. Zhou paced the workshop at all hours, his hands behind his back, pausing to inspect the various workstations before resuming his loop. He slept no more than an hour at a time. He had the best equipment and the best vitrics squad in the country. They were working at maximum output. He insisted that the failures were a result of his leadership, and he met with the teams weekly to criticize himself. It was a lonesome sight and, for those who’d lost track of time, a dreaded signal that another full week had passed.

  Zhou would call an assembly and demand that the workers struggle against him, as though they were back in those dark days of the revolution. They had nothing to say against him. He was working as hard as anyone, and he was always generous with his encouragement. He’d push on, his voice rising, insistent. Eventually he’d call a name. The worker would say, “Secretary Zhou, we believe that you work too hard and could benefit from more sleep,” or, “We notice that you sometimes forget to drink. You must maintain your intake of warm fluids or you’ll get sick.”

  Their weak criticisms failed to satisfy him, and in frustration he’d turn on himself, sometimes with great violence. “I fail to lead according to the principles of Mao Zedong thought, choosing instead to rely on my own selfish ideas. I lack courage and strength, and my weakness has led to the continued failure of Task One. For the rest of my life I will rise in the morning and think first of my weaknesses and failings as they pertain to my poor leadership of the fabrication and construction teams of Task One. My failures this week are as follows: I failed to adequately explain safety protocols to Comrade Hu Shutou, who was subsequently injured,” and so on. Comrade Hu, in all likelihood, had gone to sleep on his feet and fallen into a furnace. No safety protocol could have helped him, but Zhou would go on like this, enumerating his failures, until he’d listed every mishap from the previous week and taken personal responsibility for them. It felt indecent to watch, but the workers had no choice.

  After self-criticism, Comrade Zhou left for his meeting at Office Nine. He could have filed his weekly reports to Office Nine via messenger, but he preferred to appear in person, pedaling his Flying Pigeon an hour across town to Huangchenggen South Street, to a square sand-colored building crowded into the background by the neighboring broad-shouldered ministry buildings. Its relative anonymity, the lack of flags or insignia of any sort outside the front doors, was a sign of the secret work that went on within. From the moment he swung into the courtyard, Zhou felt the eyes of the door guards on him, and even as he ascended to the meeting room, alone in the stairwell, he knew he was being watched.

  Once he was in the conference room, Vice Mayor Li Quan set upon him: “Your teams are working at full capacity?”

  “Yes,” Zhou said. “They only leave the workshop to attend to injury or matters of personal hygiene.”

  “And you have full control of your test teams?”

  “I do, comrade. The failure is entirely my fault.”

  “I see,” Li said, pouting with that fat lower lip of his. “And the testing continues?”

  “Yes, comrade. Testing continues.”

  Testing continues. Those words could have been struck in steel and hung over the workshop’s door. Heat, fumes, explosions. Time. The intractable nature of time, the casting of quartz slabs, slower than the formation of fossils. The daily tremors that shook the barrels of Cooking Oil, setting the steel shelf frames creaking. The dreamless sleep, waking to nostrils packed with silicon dust. Through it all, testing continued. The workers of Task One would, Zhou assured the cadres of Office Nine, achieve the first goal: a perfect block of crystal eighty centimeters square, eight centimeters thick—the size of a board game as thick as a dictionary.

  “You’re receiving adequate supplies?” Li Quan asked.

  “Yes, Comrade Vice Mayor. The supply lines are operating without interruption.”

  “The test block will be available to view by the end of the month?”

  “We will increase our efforts and improve our methods,” Zhou said.

  While Zhou catalogued various experimental methodologies his teams had adopted, Vice Mayor Li Quan saw the end of his political career looming in the distance. A failure of this magnitude would guarantee him a post on a provincial revolutionary committee somewhere in Tibet. He had already secretly instructed the Beijing 901 Factory to begin work on a prototype coffin made of K9 optical glass. He had told no one at Office Nine of his plan.

  Zhou ended his report as he always did, with his resignation.

  As always, Li ignored him. If he could have found someone to replace Zhou, he would have, but who would have taken the job?

  “Your report has been received, comrade,” he said.

  “Serve the People!” Zhou said.

  In October, Zhou’s wife had come down with a case of the flu. After she’d been confined to bed for a week, her neighbors tried to convince her to go to the infirmary at t
he Academy of Sciences, but she insisted she’d be fine until Zhou could visit again. Lan Baiyu had grown up in Shanghai. Her parents were dead, and her few living relatives were too old to travel. She relied on the kindness of an older neighbor, the mother-in-law of a fellow researcher at the academy, who brought her soups and emptied the bucket. The sickness pinned her to the bed like a vise. Fever induced wild dreams. She told herself it was not possible to feel her organs aching, but within was a deep pain she’d never before experienced. She hated most the inability to think—she could only lie in the bed, sweat, and try not to provoke the pain. When she tried to compose a thought about her research she found she could barely muster the correct terms. They would float in her imagination, then fade if she tried to add more. Equations were impossible. Eventually all her efforts went into arranging her body in the least painful position. It was as though she were made of broken glass. Movement was agony, but when the urge became too insistent to ignore, she reached down, pulled the bucket across the concrete floor, positioned her buttocks, and released.

  It was that urge, a deep pressure in her bowel, that compelled her from her bed in the middle of the night. Although she had eaten little and hadn’t risen in more than a week, in a fever state she rose to make the trip outside their apartment, down the open passageway to the toilets on the other side of the building. Like the high floor, their apartment’s location far from the reek of the bathroom had been a reward for scientific and technical service to the people. She wrapped herself in a long PLA winter coat and stepped outside onto the landing. The concrete was cold beneath her bare feet, the toilets a day’s journey. She’d made it halfway, gripping the chipped metal guardrail for support, when her right leg gave out with an electric jolt that cut through the fever and brought her at once to full consciousness. Her bladder and bowels released. Then she was down, her face on the sooty concrete, her heart slamming, breath shallow and fast. She could smell her mess, and she knew she was hurt badly. Out of shame she tried to drag herself back inside instead of calling for help. She didn’t make it far, and a neighbor found her the next morning, her fibula and tibia snapped, shivering, in shock from pain and exposure.

  Beijing University Hospital was not far from Office Nine, but Zhou would leave the meeting as though he were pedaling back to the 505. He’d go two blocks south, a block east, before turning right and ducking into the hutongs that led to the neighborhood where his wife was receiving radiation treatments. It was November. Zhou had told no one at the workshop, not even Gu Yasheng, that she had bone cancer and that it was unlikely she’d survive. Did anyone ask after her? No. The work was ever-present. Who would have thought such bad luck would befall those good servants of the people?

  Testing continued. In December a powerful tremor caused a shelving bracket to snap, sending a row of Cooking Oil barrels cascading onto the workshop floor. Several sprang leaks when they hit, and those brave workers who leapt in to right the vessels suffered chemical burns on their hands and arms. They were both back the next day, thick with bandages, their eyes bloodshot, puffy, as though they’d been dipped in fire.

  Then, incrementally, there was some progress. Advancing, receding, like the shift of season, a surge of spirit-raising warmth would give way to days of slate skies and cold, but then the sun would return. In this manner Team One developed a method of casting a clear crystal cylinder, which could then be ground down to a book-size square. They’d cool the brick of crystal in the annealing furnace for two weeks, and then Gu and his welders would attack the still-searing crystal with the needle flames of their oxyhydrogen torches to release any bubbles before final grinding and polishing. It was an inelegant method, but the resulting cube was 94 percent pure, with only a few bubbles, a few wavy striations. Zhou put Team One into high production, and by the end of December they had an acceptable test blank to present to Office Nine.

  On a gray January morning, Zhou set out for his meeting at Office Nine, joined by Gu Yasheng. Comrade Gu couldn’t understand why, but Zhou had insisted on traveling by bicycle, and both wore woolen long johns, an assortment of scarves, padded army-issue long coats, and fur-lined hats with doggish earflaps. Gu had a nice pair of sheepskin gloves lined with lamb’s wool, designed for J-8 pilots, a gift from a cadre at the Ministry of Aerospace. Zhou’s hands, in synthetic leather gloves, had already stiffened into claws by the time they rode through the factory gates.

  The test slab was traveling in the back of a PLA troop transport, crated in a straw-filled box. The soldiers riding with it smelled the straw smoldering. Just beyond the gates, the truck rumbled past the cyclists, pumping black smoke from its diesel stacks. Gu waved farewell. It hadn’t passed his notice that they were among the only cyclists on the road. Packed buses trundled by, windows fogged, exhaust pipes smoking.

  “Why are you punishing an old man?” Gu said.

  “The air clears the mind,” Zhou said through his bundle of scarves.

  Another bus passed them and Gu looked wistfully after it. The power lines over the street were whipping around, singing in the wind.

  “Perhaps next week you could come up with another mind-clearing torture,” Gu said. “Starve me, then make me watch dogs eat pies. Imagine the clarity I could achieve.”

  Zhou’s usual route took him around the perimeter of Tiananmen Square, but Gu suggested they cut through. The southern end of the square was clogged with construction equipment and workers laying up the first level of Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall. As they pedaled past, Zhou couldn’t help thinking that the hall would be completed on time, but his own failure to build a simple glass coffin would bring shame to the Task One project.

  At the building on Huangchenggen South they wedged their bicycles in among the rest. Gu unstrapped his document satchel from his basket.

  “That wasn’t so bad, I guess,” he said. Somehow the exercise and the cold had relieved his coughing, and he felt loose-limbed, perhaps even a bit younger. It was the first time Gu had left the workshop in four weeks.

  Zhou was frozen to the bone, moving stiffly. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said, patting Gu on the arm. “You’re solid as brick.” The older man did look healthy, indeed. He’d pulled away his scarves to expose his nose and mouth, which were steaming like a bull’s. Zhou saw he’d drawn strength from the struggle.

  Inside, they shed their coats and hats and were shown to a conference room by a buttoned-down young woman.

  “Comrade,” Gu said to her, “is there a bottle for tea nearby?” He flashed his straight white teeth.

  “Right away, comrade,” she said. She looked back as she went out the door.

  Zhou shook his head. “You’re spoiled. Who’s ever said no to you?”

  Gu thumped his chest and laughed. “Only my enemies.”

  Zhou believed it, and he was glad to have Gu on his side. Yet he was ill at ease. Always wary, always watchful. The unwatchful didn’t survive audiences with Central Committee members.

  The slab had been uncrated in a corner of the room, and Zhou walked over to it and inspected it from several angles. It radiated heat, enough to warm his hands as he held them a few centimeters off the surface. Blackened curls of straw lay on the floor. It didn’t look like much. A piece of glass. It did not achieve six nines. He bent down and counted bubbles, and knew that even as he did, more were forming.

  “It’s not cracked, is it?” Gu said.

  “Of course not, comrade. It’s clear as water, rated to six nines, and earthquake-resistant to magnitude eight! It’s perfect.” He’d tallied twenty-seven bubbles so far, silver pinheads suspended in the crystal.

  “Don’t be nervous, little duck,” Gu said. “Vice Mayor Li once told me himself that you possess rare qualities.”

  “Don’t fill my head with shit. I’m just a humble worker.”

  The heads of Office Nine filed in, Vice Premier Gu Mu at the fore. It was his first appearance at a meeting, and after Zhou got through the technical details of the report, the vice premier commended h
im in warm, miasmic tones, phrases worn from overuse, applicable to any situation. “The Central Committee praises your team’s effort and charges you to carry on the fight.” When he finished, his mouth set into a tight line that stretched across his face like a guy wire. He rose and approached the slab. He touched it, and drew back his hand quickly, sticking his fingers between his lips.

  “It meets the specifications?” he said.

  “It is a test slab, Comrade Vice Premier,” Zhou said.

  The vice premier nodded. He pointed at a cluster of bubbles. “These little frog eggs. The final product will meet specifications, correct?”

  “Correct, Comrade Vice Premier,” Zhou said.

  The vice premier bent down and examined the slab one last time, then sighed. “Engage in successful practices,” he said, and walked out of the room.

  Zhou knew that Office Nine had lost faith in him. After the meeting concluded, Gu Yasheng was called into a room to speak with Vice Mayor Li privately. Zhou was left waiting in the hall like a schoolboy, and when Gu emerged, he told Zhou that other factories around the country had been instructed to attack the problem and achieve victory where the 505 had failed. Having already completed the task a month earlier under the vice mayor’s secret order, the director of the 901 announced to Office Nine that his teams had completed the K9 optical glass prototype in record time.

  Factories in Shanghai, Harbin, and Kunming were working furiously to produce test crystal blanks. Zhou asked Gu not to speak a word of it to their comrades back at the workshop. Like a good father, he meant to protect them from harmful knowledge.