Waste Tide

by Chen Qiufan

  “Uncle Luo, I’m full.” Mimi looked up, her tongue flicking over the corner of her mouth to pick up the stray grains of rice. The mi character behind her neck never stopped glowing.

  Luo Jincheng stood up, and Kaizong followed suit. The two stared at each other, not saying a word. Mimi looked up at them, her face peaceful.

  “Can I trust you?” Kaizong finally said, helplessly. He put his hand on Luo’s shoulder—he knew how rude such a gesture was, but he couldn’t help it. “Can you promise you won’t hurt her?”

  Carefully, Luo took Kaizong’s hand off of his shoulder, held it in his own hand, and shook it forcefully twice.

  “There’s a folk saying among the people of Silicon Isle: lodaitaocugcui, danzêgbhuno.15 When Big Luo says ‘one,’ it will never be ‘two.’” His smile held traces of pride as well as embarrassment. “I am Big Luo.”

  * * *

  Once again, Seisen Suzuki appeared on the screen before Scott. It was decades later, and though her hair was graying and her face no longer smooth, she still displayed her uncommon elegance and graceful temperament. She appeared in various forums: companies, human rights organizations, international NGOs, governmental bodies. She waved her arms, shouting as though defending something, but few were in the audience. Her figure appeared lonely and aged, like a willow shriveling and dying in the winds of time.

  As a result of Dr. Suzuki’s incessant lobbying, in 1997, QNB was formally listed in the Chemical Weapons Convention. She dedicated the latter years of her life to researching cures for the long-term consequences of QNB and invented an experimental treatment involving gene-modified viruses to repair the muscarinic receptors in the brains of victims. However, due to lack of funding and necessary technology, the treatment could not advance to the clinical trial stage.

  Dr. Suzuki was never married. Due to the constraints of military security protocol, she never revealed the total number of victims suffering diseases related to QNB exposure.

  The scene shifted to a blurred, pale yellow; the lens soon focused, revealing the detailed patterns in the wallpaper. An old woman dressed in white sat in front of the camera, her posture easy and elegant, imbued with a highly controlled, precise beauty. Taped to the inside of her right arm was the white curve of an auto-injector, from which a green LED flashed. The numbers at the bottom of the screen indicated that it was March 3, 2003.

  She nodded and smiled at the camera, the wrinkles on her face sketching out its soft curves.

  She spoke in English.

  “I am Seisen Suzuki, the inventor of QNB, and a sinner.

  “Sixty years ago today, my fiancé, Hideo Kuboki, died in a sea battle. His tragic death forced me into making a wrong choice: I believed that I could, on my own, stop the terrors of war. As you all know, I came to the United States, obtained my doctorate, joined the military, and invented QNB. They told me that thousands upon thousands of soldiers were alive because of my invention, and had the chance to return from the battlefield to be reunited with their loved ones.

  “They were telling the truth, but they were also lying.

  “QNB caused irreversible physiological changes to the brain’s nerve-ending receptors. The survivors would spend the rest of their lives in an inescapable web of delirium, terror, and hallucination. I have tried to remedy my error, but it is too late. I confess my sins and apologize to all the victims.

  “I must also confess my sins and apologize to all the experimental subjects who were injured or died during the research process. You had already paid the price for your crimes, and did not deserve the torture I inflicted upon you. It matters not that my intent in committing evil was to do good—evil is evil; or perhaps the evil in my heart that sought vengeance had disguised itself as good, resulting in all this. I honestly don’t know … please, all I can say is I’m sorry.”

  The old woman bowed her head deeply; the loose folds of skin at the back of her neck were stretched taut, like the membrane under a bird’s wings.

  “Today is the anniversary of my fiancé’s death, and it is also the day of my atonement. I hope my death, though insignificant, will tell everyone that war destroys not only flesh, but also the soul. May all our souls rest in peace.”

  She smiled once more and pressed the button on the auto-injector. The green light flashed faster, turned yellow, then red, and finally went out.

  Seisen Suzuki took a long breath and closed her eyes, as though savoring the chemicals flowing into her veins. The expression on that face, carved by the vicissitudes of life, changed rapidly as though each wrinkle was relaxing. Abruptly, her eyes flew open and she gazed at some spot above the camera, her face aglow with the joy of meeting a dear friend after long separation. Softly, she spoke in Japanese: “Kuboki-kun, hibari yori sora ni yasurō tōge ka na.”

  My dear Kuboki, resting here atop the ridge, down below, the song of soaring skylarks.16

  She closed her eyes again, as if asleep, the heaving motions of her body gradually slowing down until they ceased, some formless thing having departed from her aged shell. Suzuki was like a puppet whose strings had been cut, collapsing slowly under the influence of gravity. Her noble head bowed, and then her whole body sank into the chair.

  Seisen Suzuki died at 83. Project Waste Tide was then quietly shut down and all related documents sealed away. The ownership of the three-hundred-plus patents she had been granted is a mystery, and an unknown number of victims suffering the aftereffects of QNB are still scattered around the world, struggling with daily life.

  Scott sat still in his room, unable to dismiss the poignant scene of Suzuki’s death. He could not have imagined that Project Waste Tide had shrouded such shocking secrets. A complex set of emotions warred within him: respect for this scientist, sinner, and ordinary woman who had waited alone for more than sixty years for her fiancé, but even more so, he felt pity, for this woman had shouldered too much of the responsibilities and guilt that did not belong to her.

  Am I not the same? The idea flashed through his mind, and he chuckled. Even his pity turned out to be nothing more than a part of his self-protection mechanism.

  Numerous nodes of complex data surfaced like reef islands in the sea, forming a confusing maze. Scott lifted his hands and, like a conductor facing a symphony orchestra, traced out graceful arcs in the air. His hands shifted through a dazzling array of gestures, which the high-precision sensors caught and translated into digital signals that acted on the corresponding information nodes: moving, magnifying, folding, unfolding, revealing details, building connections … A flashing web gradually took shape, a network of irregular topology that exuded the beauty of a twisted rationality.

  The corners of Scott’s mouth curved up in a hint of a smile; he had some ideas on how to solve this riddle.

  Gently, he spun his index finger and brought the information node named “Mimi” to the center of the network and marked it with a golden question mark.

  11

  She suspected that she was trapped in a shell named “Mimi,” but she didn’t know the reasons for her confinement.

  It was like that distant nightmare: she bored into the body of a steel giant and turned into the giant itself—waving her metallic glinting arms, ripping apart barriers made of frigid rain and wind, running, leaping, hunting … killing. She knew it wasn’t real. She hoped it wasn’t real.

  However, right now Mimi was experiencing the hallucination of being a guest in her own body. Since the moment she recovered her consciousness, this sensation had only grown stronger. Even worse, she couldn’t control this flesh body as effectively as she had controlled the robot. The anxiety surfaced time and again, seizing her autonomic nervous system and heart and shaking them about; but then, a euphoric peace of unknown origin would be secreted from a certain part of her brain and calm her anxiety, making her feel she was on cloud nine. At other times, her heart palpitated and unease gripped her, while needles pricked at some phantom limb as if trying to prevent her from thinking of some idea or taking som
e action.

  It was as though this body was trying to tame the soul incarcerated within it.

  She remembered standing next to the window, after waking up in the hospital, and watching as Kaizong hurried out of the taxi. She had wanted to wave at him, to shout at him, to use every means at her disposal to let him see that she was standing right here. She’d wanted to give the fake foreigner a hug—something she had never done and wouldn’t have even dreamed of doing. You are nothing but a WASTE GIRL. The label had been branded in her heart more securely than the film applied to the back of her neck, impossible to erase. All of her actions and choices had been circumscribed by that label, an invisible line that she had not dared to cross.

  She had stood there, unmoving, until Kaizong appeared in the doorway behind her.

  Then she’d heard an impossible conversation being carried on. Inconceivable words drifted out of Mimi’s lips and disappeared. She’d seen Mimi grip Kaizong’s hand, let go, and then his hands had seized hers. She was certain that she had gone insane.

  This body had achieved what she had dreamed of but never managed to act out, even if it was such an insignificant gesture. But every gesture from this body seemed to be aimed at controlling Kaizong, which made Mimi anxious. She had never so clearly felt the difference between genders when it came to receiving and decoding information, and it was a difference that could be exploited. Shame and satisfaction filled her mind almost simultaneously, like red hot sauce stirred into white rice porridge.

  She’d heard music, the music that played in her mind. Like a tune from a wound-up music box, the tune repeated itself endlessly. The high-spirited melody was so familiar, and, mixed with the twisted horn blares and the drumbeats that struck the ends of her nerves, brought about a singular pleasure.

  Even more terrifyingly, she’d known where the music came from. In a flash, a kind of logical integration capability she had never mastered assembled all the fragments into a path of clues and displayed it before her.

  The cheap sound systems in the taxis could not distinguish between bass and midrange tones, and so they were only tolerable to the listener when playing music with simple parts, high-pitched tones, and little reliance on harmony. The Silicon Isle traffic station had adjusted to the need and broadcast a large number of shanzhai songs processed to display such characteristics, thus becoming the cabbies’ standard station on the job—just another excruciating local quirk. However, every hour, on the hour, all the local stations had to rebroadcast the city central station’s time announcement, which involved a segment of two commercials set against the background of a piece of classical music. The traffic station, in order to save time, decided to compress the segment, thus causing it to sound half a beat faster than the original.

  Just like the 1812 Overture coming out of Mimi’s lips.

  She had felt afraid of herself—a profound sensation of terror that seeped into her marrow. Kaizong had taken her to places in taxis; she had, from her shack, listened to the standard time announcement music play on various stations countless times; and she might have, during random dinner conversations, heard Brother Wen mention these kinds of technical details, which only a geek would care about. But she had never imagined that her mind possessed such power to organize scattered bits of information and weave them, like silk strands extracted from disparate cocoons, into a coherent picture.

  She couldn’t understand the meaning of this new awareness; all she could see was the shock and terror on Kaizong’s face. A wave of sorrow chilled her heart.

  She had discovered that she felt this world differently. She didn’t know how to describe it precisely, but it was like someone who, after jumping out of a deep well and seeing the open sky and earth for the first time, gained rich multiple perspectives and finely layered emotions. Even when she thought about everything that had happened on Tide Gazing Beach, pure hatred and disgust were now replaced with a grander, more complex emotion. She seemed to understand why Knifeboy had done what he had done, and his ultimate fate. She even pitied him.

  * * *

  The Luo clan turned their ancestral hall into the site for the ceremony: washed stone walls, red bricks, clay tiles. The shrine held a golden statue of the Buddha from Chiang Mai in Thailand at the top, and the tablets of generations of Luo clan ancestors were arranged in rows below. Electric candles flickered amid twisting columns of incense smoke. Luo Zixin’s bed had been moved to the middle of the hall. His pallid, puny body lay still, stuck full of tubes and wires, and his eyes were tightly shut, revealing no sign of life; if not for the slow beats from the cardiograph, one might have thought this was a drowned corpse.

  The idea for conducting the ritual here was to take advantage of the power of the ancestors and the Buddha to suppress evil spirits, but all who were present in the hall shivered as though standing in an ice cellar. Surrounded by the uncanny atmosphere, they felt a prickling sensation on their backs.

  Kaizong saw Director Lin Yiyu come into the hall and finally understood what Luo Jincheng had meant by people Kaizong “already knew” as well as how the security at the hospital had been so easily breached. Director Lin nodded at him but didn’t come closer. His expression was even grimmer than Luo Jincheng’s, as though it were his own son who was in a coma.

  Mimi sat calmly to the side, waiting for the show to start.

  Kaizong refocused his attention on her: her habitual timidity tinged with anxiety was gone, replaced by a calmness that seemed to come from deep inside, the confidence of someone fully in control of the situation. He didn’t believe it was an act: the glowing mi at the back of her neck was the surest proof. Something had changed inside Mimi. Is it the metal particles? Kaizong grew apprehensive again. He didn’t know how to face this brand-new Mimi; he even felt a trace of fear.

  Her face looked different from before. There was no longer a mark on her bottom lip from her nervous biting, and her brows seemed arched higher. What kind of soul is hidden under that face?

  The lohsingpua appeared right on time in a sleeveless, multicolored dress, the wrinkles on her face smoothed over with a thick layer of red makeup and her facial features painted to resemble an angry spirit. She had Mimi sit about three feet from the crown of Luo Zixin’s head, so that Mimi was the midpoint of a straight line from the child to the golden Buddha. Then she stuck a piece of green film with the character for “edict”—chi—onto Zixin’s and Mimi’s foreheads, just like the one on her own.

  She lit a candle and sprinkled the spicy, pungent holy water made of wormwood, calamus, and garlic around the ancestral hall, muttering all the while and praying for goodwill from the spirits. When she was done, she returned to Zixin’s bed and accepted an oil-filled porcelain bowl from her assistant. After chanting more incantations, she lit the bowl on fire, and orange flames indicating incomplete combustion rose from her hands, dancing uneasily.

  She began to circle Zixin’s bed in a clockwise direction; her gait was slow and jerky, following some inaudible drumbeat. In a low voice, she muttered verses of Buddhist scripture, interspersed from time to time with loud howls like chill winds passing through a pine forest in deep night. Everyone in the hall felt goose bumps on their backs.

  Kaizong’s heart was tugged into his throat, where it clenched with every step the lohsingpua took, terrified that she might trip and spill the scalding, burning bowl of oil onto Mimi. He didn’t believe in these superstitious rites and didn’t really think that Luo Zixin would wake up from his coma as a result of the performance or that Mimi was going to die in the boy’s place; however, there were aspects of the spectacle he was witnessing that he couldn’t explain: for instance, how could the witch hold the bowl, whose surface temperature was surely now in the triple digits, with her bare hands?

  Mimi showed no hint of surprise or fear; she simply watched the lohsingpua with a curious expression. Her face brightened and dimmed by turns as the woman with the bowl of flames circled around her, the light reflecting from her eyes in peculiar patterns. />
  The few VIPs present gasped. The chi in the film applied to Zixin’s forehead flickered to life; almost simultaneously, the film on Mimi’s and the lohsingpua’s foreheads also lit up.

  The witch moved faster. Like a busy worker bee, she traced out a complex figure-eight pattern around Zixin’s bed and Mimi, shifting her direction constantly. The fire flared in her hands, and her howls seemed to echo and dash around the hall. The three chi characters on their foreheads winked in synchrony, speeding up in rhythm, but Zixin’s cardiogram continued to be as steady and calm as before.

  The audience held their breaths, waiting for the climactic moment. As soon as Mimi screamed with fright, the witch would smash the bowl against the ground and shriek at the top of her lungs, completing the “substitution” phase of the ritual. However, someone wasn’t following the script: Mimi didn’t even shift from her sitting pose, while the witch was already having trouble catching her breath. Sweat had carved multiple trails in her makeup, like bloody tears.

  Kaizong watched the farce with growing interest, wondering how it was going to end.

  Another collective gasp. The film over Mimi’s forehead began to flicker at a different frequency, no longer in sync with the other two. Her placid expression had also changed; she knit her brows, deep in thought, or perhaps struggling against some invisible force. She stared at some spot in the air as her eyelids quivered, a familiar quivering that made Kaizong’s heart palpitate.

  The film over Zixin’s forehead syncopated and departed from the flickering rhythm of the film over the lohsingpua’s forehead. Gradually, its rhythm approached Mimi’s. Some invisible hand seemed to be adjusting and coordinating the three lights. Right now, Mimi and the comatose boy were tuned to the same channel. A look of incredulity appeared on Luo Jincheng’s face, mixed with a trace of anxious hope.