“Yes. Yes, I just called also. Thank you.” As she spoke she looked at the card in her hand: the understated corporate logo of his Cloud Development Group and a short, impressive list of his titles. “It’s exceptionally kind of you to meet me yourself,” she said. “Too kind.”
“It’s nothing but my pleasure.” Amiable wrinkles fanned out from the ends of his eyes and framed the sides of his face. She saw him take her measure, her no-nonsense clothes, her spare, conservative body, and then she saw his eyes rest infinitesimally on her ears. Didn’t expect that, did you? She held his gaze easily.
“Come,” he said. “Your luggage has been seen to. I’m sure you’re very tired.”
His driver took the expressway to Dongzhimenwai, through an endless forest of white high-rise apartment buildings and office towers, all the same, the repeating pattern left by sudden modernization. When they stopped at a traffic light, Gao saw her rolling down the window, tilting her face to the air from the outdoors. “What is it?” he said.
She let out a small laugh. “The Beijing smell.”
He smiled at her. He knew that smell too. It was largely gone now, suffocated by the dust of demolition and construction. Yet the half-fetid aroma still pooled here and there. It smelled neither pleasant nor unpleasant; like garbage, progress, the past. It was seven hundred years of living and dying, all manner of putrid waste finished with a lovely overlay, the delicate xiang of each pale flower of culture and learning in its season. One of the city’s subtle charms.
The shouts of vendors washed into the car, the roaring and gunning of vehicles, the bursts of recorded music from thrust-open doors. Character signs blinked and glowed in the night, advertising stores, restaurants, businesses; trees and awnings were festooned with light. They turned south on Jiaodaokou and then west into a long hutong, a narrow lane lined with stone walls rising to the old-fashioned curved roof eaves. In through a double gate, then they stopped. Already an attendant was removing Lia’s bags and walking them away to a side court.
“The driver will return for you at eight in the morning,” Gao Yideng told her from the front seat. He took out another card and wrote on it. “My mobile phone.” He handed it to her. “It’s always on. Call me anytime, dark or light.”
“Thank you.”
He looked at her speculatively. She stood under the glow of the streetlamp, not unattractive, odd-looking, prim with intelligence. She also seemed strong. He would enjoy this. “Peaceful night, Miss Fan,” he said courteously.
“The same.”
She walked away from the car, thinking, why this place? Foreigners usually stayed at big, well-appointed hotels with conference rooms and Internet trunk lines. Secrecy, she guessed. Discretion.
Her courtyard did have charm. Four inward-facing rooms looked out from under wood-arched verandas, intricately painted in ersatz Qing style. At that moment she realized she’d have to draw on her last reserves to even walk the last few steps to the door of her room, where surely there waited at least a bed. A yawn ballooned up in her throat. She liked it well enough. It would do.
When some hours later she opened her eyes again, in that small room in a side court in Beijing, she did not get up right away but let herself drift. Her hearing aids were out and she was in an ocean of peace. She liked to reach back to this, her silent void.
It was not until she was seventeen months old that she had been diagnosed and fitted with hearing aids. When they were ready, the audiologist pressed them in and suddenly the sharp, blinding noise of the world exploded in her head. She burst into tears, terrified. Nothing in her life could have prepared her to imagine sound. Later, of course, she came to love being able to hear-for what it was. To her it had its limitations. She also liked not hearing. She liked to lie like this, right now, with her hearing aids out, in the silence. The empty space had a soothing pressure.
She remembered what it was like before. What she did hear was bloated, underwater versions of sounds-especially when people tried to talk at her. It was impossible for her to make any sense of the stretched-out, distorted noises that came from people’s mouths. She also heard what she later understood to be the tinnitus commonly associated with her type of sensory neural hearing loss-a roaring, a remote wind, an intermittent wall of interference. She wondered if this was a set of signals from the world around her, but it too proved unintelligible.
Luckily the language of objects, with its patterns of form and color and feeling, made sense to her from the start. She started with the things in their apartment. Her mother, Anita, had loved things and constantly acquired them. She shopped, she walked galleries, she cruised flea markets and junk stores. She took Lia. And this in its way was Lia’s first tongue, the language of longing and being sated. By the time she started hearing, and others began to “fix” her, certain things in her were already fixed. Objects spoke to her with their form and their finish, their shape, their physical soul. She wanted to know and feel all of them she could.
Yet even to understand the objects in a single room, in a single drawer, took such concentration. One leaf contained a neural branchwork of almost infinite complexity, as well as endless shades of green. External factors such as the play of light and the movement of air multiplied things further. Yet the object itself was constant. It stayed where you put it. You could study it for a lifetime, you could spend years knowing it; it would not change. It would still be there, be the same.
At first she cataloged things by feelings. There was the white-lit joy in the round, perfect forms of her toys; the statuesque upward longing of the legs of a table; the tristesse of sun slanting down on her mother’s grouping of statues and vases and antique dolls. These became her first memory-markers. They led her, in her mental maze, to the rooms of memory that contained what she knew. This was always her system. It was right for her. Much later she read about how Seneca of Rome had been able to repeat back two thousand names in order, and King Cyrus of Persia had recited the law in twenty-two languages-and then she knew she was not alone. Remembering made sense to her. It was something she was born to do, even if it meant she was born in the wrong time. Some kids played sports, some studied piano; she worked at memory.
She glanced at the clock. Seven-fifty. Driver at eight. She rolled off the bed and stood up and stretched and checked herself in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were puffy. They were gray and expressive, but they had a sad downcast tilt to them. Swollen, they looked pathetic. She applied a cold-soaked cloth to them, counted to thirty, and pulled it off. Nope. The same. She gave up.
She rummaged in her suitcase. Already things were spilled out over the floor. She pulled out a gray skirt and a long gray tube-shaped top. Had she brought any other colors? She pushed the disorganized pile aside. A flash of red, salmon, chalky white-yes, there were a few other things. Everything was knit, nothing wrinkled. She always traveled like this. She pulled her clothes on in front of the mirror, watching her straight up-and-down body. She looked okay. She always felt she barely got by with dressing and adornment. At least she’d figured out how to put herself together, though it was an act, on a certain level. She leaned over from the waist to fasten her antique-penny-colored hair at the crown of her head, then stood up and braided it all the way down.
Hitching up her leather bag and her computer, she stepped out into the soft morning air. Shiny-leafed camellias crowded up along the covered walkway. Above the arching roofs the sky was blue, faintly tinged with the brown of pollution. Through the old round gate she could see the car waiting. Oh, my pots! she thought. Finally.