The Invisibility Cloak

by Ge Fei

  Given my thick skull and poor memory, I can’t be sure I’ve recounted what Bai Cheng’en said word-for-word, but that was the gist of it. After accepting his chastisement, my face turned crimson and I felt pathetic—you can probably visualize the whole scene. Although I’m a fairly stubborn guy, I’m definitely not the kind who’s deaf to criticism. I mulled over what the counselor said for months, and listened to all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, as well as the late quartets, from start to finish. In the end, I had to admit that my life might be beyond hope.

  It was impossible for me not to like Beethoven.

  But Bai Cheng’en’s admonitions caused another very different but obvious side effect. From then on, every time I wired money to a seller, I would always be as careful as I could. I feared that the bad luck the counselor had prophesied would suddenly fall upon my head.

  It was precisely that fear which made me break into a cold sweat as I wired payment for the Linn 12 to the seller in Tongzhou.

  I already mentioned that sixty-eight thousand yuan totaled practically my whole savings. I wired it to the account he had given me, but heard nothing for three straight days. I called him repeatedly, but he sounded irritated when we spoke and was always traveling—now way down south in Guizhou, now far northwest in Inner Mongolia. Then I couldn’t even get through to him: either his phone was turned off, or I got the “We’re sorry, the subscriber you have dialed is unavailable right now.”

  I asked Songping what to do. He told me to stop wasting time and call the police. Next I gritted my teeth and asked Bai Cheng’en’s advice. I fully expected him to take the opportunity to sneer at my idiocy. But instead, he quietly considered it for a moment, then suggested against calling the police for now. He told me to calm down and wait a few more days. Needless to say, the counselor’s advice once again proved correct.

  The very day I completed work on the 845 amplifier, the seller of the Linn 12 phoned me. He said he was standing at the front door of my apartment building, holding the machine. Clearly the impetuous type. He said he had just come back from Benxi, up in Manchuria, and apologized profusely for the late delivery. He even brought me some of the local specialties he had bought during his the trip: a bag of pine nuts, a bag of hazelnuts, and a small bottle of walnut oil. After carrying the machine upstairs, out of courtesy I asked if he’d like to join me for dinner. He readily agreed. While we ate, he got up “to hit the head,” and ended up paying the check.

  Later discoveries further indicated that he really was an upstanding guy. The ad he had posted online for the machine promised its condition as “95% new,” but when I lifted it out of the soft plastic wrapping I could see it might as well have arrived straight from the factory. The pale gray metal body emanated a chilly sheen along with a strong sharp smell. This marked my first intimate contact with a Lotus 12 player. You may have heard the other nickname audiophiles have bestowed on it: The Drug.

  I must admit that I was pretty excited. I plugged the power cord into the adapter, connected the adapter to the 845, then linked the Autograph speakers with my Vovox cables. I hurried along so quick that I sliced my finger on the adapter’s wire housing. The hour neared ten o’clock— the patter of footsteps and the crying of children from other apartments had faded away. I couldn’t wait to hear how the full system would sound. The half hour it took to warm up felt interminably long.

  While I waited, my sister called.

  As soon as she opened her mouth, nothing could shut her up. She asked over and over what I thought of Hou Meizhu. She wrongfully interpreted my reluctance to answer as shyness. The truth was I didn’t want to ruin my mood before trying out the new system, so I suppressed my anger and chose my words carefully; she took it as a green light to push me harder, even to the point of telling me to strike while the iron was hot and go fill out the marriage registration forms with Hou Meizhu that weekend. She drove me over the edge.

  “Go fuck your mother!” I yelled into the phone.

  “Ei, ei, ei, what kind of language is that?! My mother? And who’s your mother, then?”

  8. SATIE, THE GNOSSIENNES

  DING CAICHEN lived in an area called Sleeping Dragon Valley, on the border of Tianjin and Pinggu, though technically a suburb of the former. I took Fushi Road out to the West Fifth Ring Road and circled north, merging onto the Airport Expressway and on to the Beijing-Pinggu highway, which starts next to Terminal 3.

  As Ding Caichen’s directions indicated, exactly an hour and a half later I entered a fairly short tunnel, before coming to a tollbooth in Tian Valley, at which I paid twenty-five yuan, then turned onto an empty mountain road.

  Autumn was coming to an end. The various deciduous trees—sumacs, maples, smoke trees, dawn redwoods—had been turned a deeper red by the frost. The entire mountain range shone with their colors—not only a pure red, but a collage of deep purples, browns, and bright yellows. This must be what native Beijingers refer to when they talk about the “mountain brocade” that only appears in late autumn. Who knew that such a beautiful place could be hidden away in the suburbs of Beijing! As I wound down the narrow mountain road, a feeling of awe washed over me, as well as feelings of sorrow and resentment for being excluded. You can’t help but admire the sense of smell the wealthy possess. Even at the edges of a foul, trash-infested city, they always find a way to hunt down the last patches of pristine territory and claim them as their own.

  At a deserted fork in the road, I came to the massive billboard where Ding Caichen had agreed to meet me: it displayed the phrase “Development is the only way” on top of a not particularly true-to-life profile portrait of Deng Xiaoping. Ding Caichen waited for me in a black Volkswagen sedan parked directly under the billboard. He didn’t get out of his car, but merely hit the horn twice and beckoned with a wave from his window. I followed him down a mountain lane heading east, and after twenty minutes, we turned onto an even narrower road that skirted a golf course.

  If you’ve ever been to the art districts in the Beijing suburbs, like 789 or The Distillery, it will be easy for you to imagine the style of the houses in Sleeping Dragon Valley. Lots of red brick walls; long, asymmetrical lines of windows; cylindrical water towers and exposed steel I beams. If not for the fancy cars that decorated the driveways, you might think you had wandered into a 1950s factory district. Scattered over the gentle mountain slopes, the buildings lay low amid forests of naked trees, their elaborate design masked by outward simplicity, their masterful detail peeping out from crude wilderness. Seen from far off, they looked less like high-end residential spaces than random piles of lumber.

  Ding Caichen appeared to be over forty; fairly thin and not very tall; face tired, slightly sickly. He wore a black zip-up turtleneck sweater and gray corduroy pants. The beard on his split-rail face didn’t really stand out. His small, round eyes appeared close together behind the tea-colored lenses of his spectacles.

  Every so often he would sniff audibly.

  I reached out a hand with instinctive cordiality, just as I realized that he had no intention of shaking it. By then it was too late, and so to avoid embarrassment I grabbed his right hand and gave it a symbolic wag—it felt soft and feeble. Yet for the most part I didn’t sense anything mysterious about him, at least nothing that might instill fear. His occasional smiles even betrayed a sort of awkward shyness. I couldn’t understand why Jiang Songping had behaved so strangely when he described him to me.

  Ding Caichen asked me about my drive, where I had come from, whether the six-car accident that had occurred that morning in the tunnel had been cleaned up or not. Other questions followed of the standard small-talk variety. Then he waved to a couple of security guards patrolling nearby. The guards understood immediately, left their patrols and jogged over to us. “We’ll go in and have a cup of tea first,” Ding Caichen said to me. “They’ll handle the stuff in the car.” He started walking.

  I hurriedly reminded him that two guards might not be enough to lift the boxes; he merely waved a hand and
replied, without turning around, “Don’t worry about it. They’ll think of something.”

  I followed him through a small wooden door to the north end of the grounds. We walked down a narrow cobblestone path around a copse of tallow trees blackened by frost, ascended three or four stone steps, and arrived at the house’s eastern gate. Along both sides of this tiered walk-way ran a narrow corridor filled with flowers and shrubs that extended into the courtyard.

  The first thing that struck me about the house was how its architecture created an intensely private environment. The raised entryway lead to a sunken living room, dining room, and kitchen, seamlessly divided into three independent units by low walls and screens. A full-length picture window in the living room provided excellent natural sunlight, and the high perimeter wall outside prevented any hopeful passersby from peering into the house, while those inside still enjoyed a full view of the colorful outdoor scenery.

  In a previous telephone conversation, I had asked Ding Caichen to describe the layout of his living room. The floor-to-ceiling window on the south side worried me. As I’m sure you know, glass is terrible at containing sound. Sound waves bounce off the glass to create interference that ruins the final stereo imaging effect. Ding Caichen followed my advice and installed a thick curtain in front of the south wall. As you can see, Ding Caichen clearly seemed to be a reasonable man, open to suggestions. His living room, though spacious, didn’t provide a favorable listening environment for enjoying music. Usually the best place to position a speaker would be along the shortest wall of a room. But the shortest walls in this room were on the east and west ends, and they had no empty space. The west wall was occupied by a tower air conditioner, which couldn’t be moved easily, and next to it a colossal fish tank, complete with softly undulating water plants and two eel-like animals (I learned later these were actually prized Arowana fish) swimming back and forth. An egg-shaped sun room was built along the eastern wall of the living room. Also not a good place to put a sound system, especially given the wooden lounge chair and circular nightstand taking up the space.

  I noticed a tray atop the side table with a coffee mug, book, and two sky-blue hairpins on it. It seemed reasonable to conclude that the lady of the house had just been here reading a book or basking in the sun, and had left before we entered.

  By the time they hauled the pair of bulky Autograph speakers into the living room, the number of security guards had increased from two to six. Ding Caichen instructed them to place the speakers down in front of the window that served as the southern wall. Yet this would position them too close to the sofa, negatively affecting the projection of sound. I didn’t mention this to Ding Caichen. Though he seemed like a calm, amiable person, I had noticed his eyebrows constantly knitting together in a pensive manner, and he wasn’t saying much.

  As I prepared to test my creation, I asked him if it would be all right to draw the curtains. He took a quiet drag on his cigarette, then looked at me and replied softly, “Oh . . . whatever you like.”

  His voice, tired and weak, possessed none of the impatient eagerness you’d expect from an audiophile about to test out a new sound system. With slight disappointment, I asked him to move toward the center of the sofa, so that his ears would line up in an equilateral triangle with the two speakers.

  He froze for a second, as if stunned, then did as I asked.

  In order to lighten the mood a little, I proudly described the remarkable features of the machinery, emphasizing its legendary reputation in the audiophile world. As to whether or not you can call it the world’s finest sound system, I said to him, I couldn’t be sure, but it was absolutely the best I had ever heard. I admitted half-jokingly that I had held on to the speakers for twelve whole years, never able to part with them. I had feelings for them, I said, sort of like the way you’d feel toward a daughter, or lover.

  “That would be incest, wouldn’t it?” Ding Caichen looked up at me and forced a smile.

  I had brought three test CDs with me. The first a piano recording, naturally, to test the system’s differentiation capacity as well as the purity of the sound. The second Cecilia Bartoli singing Donizetti, to show my Autographs’ new owner the unbelievable fullness and subtle sound quality produced by its dual concentric core. The last a 1990 Chesky recording of Antal Dorati conducting the Royal Philharmonic in “Dance of the Seven Veils,” from Richard Strauss’s Salome. Everyone knows this is a particularly valuable album, the work of the master recording engineer Kenneth Wilkinson in his prime.

  I played three- to five-minute samples from each recording in consecutive order. I observed with considerable shock that Ding Caichen appeared to be tone-deaf. The music didn’t move him at all. His face remained entirely expressionless, as if covered in wax. You can imagine the rage that boiled up within me. Besides the occasional sniff, he even picked up a newspaper from the coffee table, before putting it down after realizing the room was too dark to read in. Why a tone-deaf man should ask Jiang Songping to find him “the best sound system in the world” was a question I couldn’t bring myself to pursue, due to my utter disappointment. My heart sank; I began to simply go through the motions of my work.

  After I switched to the Salome recording, Ding Caichen surprised me by clearing his throat and asking, “Isn’t this a little loud? Hmm? Don’t you think? Can you play the other one again?”

  Hearing this, I immediately stopped the frenetic orchestral dancing of Salome and returned to the beautiful Bartoli, the image of John the Baptist’s head on a plate still floating before me.

  “No, no, not this one,” interjected Ding Caichen, “the first one, the piano piece.”

  So he wanted Pascal Rogé’s performance.

  Ding Caichen began to listen intently, and offered simple, sporadic appraisals of what he heard. He put on no airs of being an expert, speaking haltingly and without confidence. And yet, though I can’t tell you exactly why, I couldn’t help but feel that his general understanding of the music seemed accurate. As when he commented, “The piano’s voice sounds like it’s coming through a fog. I don’t mean a thick, blinding fog—more like a thin, gauzy mist. Soft and indistinct. What do you think?”

  “Yes, very possible.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Satie, a French composer.”

  “Is he famous?”

  “Hard to say.” I adjusted the volume slightly and replied, “A lot of people secretly like his music.”

  “Why do you say ‘secretly’?”

  “Well, I mean, Satie’s historical standing isn’t very high. Most people who listen to music—here in China, I mean—don’t really know him. I suppose I can’t really say that now, as more and more people have been listening to him in recent years. I guess what I mean is that, historically speaking, he’s been overlooked. You know, he was Debussy’s teacher.”

  “And who is this Debussy?”

  “Debussy? I just told you, Satie’s student.”

  “I’m sorry, I know nothing about music.” From his tone it sounded like Ding Caichen’s mood had elevated a bit. “What’s the name of the piece we’re listening to?”

  “Gnossiennes.”

  “Doesn’t it sound veiled in a mist?”

  “You know, I can see a fog there. I had never noticed it before. If you like this CD, I can leave it here for you.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Ding Caichen said, hugging his arms, his voice once again chilly and restrained.

  I’ll be honest: by the time we had listened to the six Gnossiennes in sequential order, I had developed a real fondness for Ding Caichen. The man’s knowledge of classical music was obviously poor—you could even call it complete ignorance. Yet his concentration and devout attention to the music as he listened impressed me. He acted nothing like your average audiophile, who talked big and put on a show of understanding when he understood nothing, for fear of being seen as an amateur; he disclosed no such egoism or pretense. For the duration of our listening, he sat on the couch with his u
pper body tilted slightly forward, hand on his chin, quiet as a sleeping baby. Even his habitual sniff had gone.

  “Let me ask you this: If it weren’t Rogé playing, but someone else, would the performance be very different?” Ding Caichen drew back the curtains to let the sunlight in from the courtyard. He held the CD in his hands and examined both sides of it as he spoke.

  “Well, sure, that goes without saying. If it had been Lang Lang playing that piece, the misty aura you just heard might not have been present at all. Different performers will always interpret a piece very differently.”

  “Fine, fine . . . so, besides Satie, are there any other composers with similar styles that I could listen to?”

  I thought for a moment, then told him that if he liked this type of music, the pupil of Satie’s I had previously mentioned, Debussy, definitely would be worth listening to, particularly his Images series and the 24 Preludes. Chopin’s nocturnes and Haydn’s piano sonatas would also be good choices.

  “Fine, fine . . . And what’s a harpsichord?”

  “The harpsichord is the forefather of the modern piano. Some call it the ‘ancient piano.’ Do you like the harpsichord?” I couldn’t help but look up and examine this mysterious man who so terrified Jiang Songping.

  “I’ve never heard it before. Just a random question.”

  Ding Caichen looked nervously at his watch, sniffed hard, and asked with a slight frown that if I wasn’t in a hurry to get home, would I be able to stay for lunch. The invitation sounded forced; I imagined he hoped I’d refuse.