‘They have their uses.’
‘May I ask what you drive?’
‘A Toyota.’
‘Hybrid?’
‘Fuel cell.’ Jericho turned the mobile over in his hand and glanced at the connection points. With an adapter he could have projected the contents onto his new holowall, but it wasn’t being delivered until the evening. He clicked through to the folder. ‘May I?’
‘Please. There are only three films on it, all of Yoyo.’
Jericho pointed the device at the wall opposite and activated the integrated beamer. He focused the picture to the size of a standard flat screen so there would be enough clarity despite the penetrating sunlight, and started the first recording.
Tu Tian had been right.
No, he hadn’t done her justice! Yoyo wasn’t just pretty, she was extraordinarily beautiful. During his time in London Jericho had familiarised himself with the most differing of theories about the existence of beauty: facial symmetry, the shaping of particular features like the eyes or lips, proportioning of bone structure, the amount of childlike characteristics. Studies like these were used in the psychological fight against crime, and they were also used as the basis of tracking down people disguising themselves with virtual personalities. Modern studies concluded that perfect feminine beauty was defined by large, round eyes and a high, lightly curved forehead, while the nose had to be slender and the chin small but clearly defined. If you processed women’s faces in a morphing program and added a certain percentage of childlike features, the rate of approval from male viewers soared spontaneously. Full lips trumped narrow ones, eyes which were too close lost against those set at a certain distance. The perfect Venus had high cheekbones, narrow, dark brows, long lashes, glossy hair and an even hairline.
Yoyo was all of this – and yet none of it.
Chen had filmed her during a performance in some badly lit club, flanked by musicians who might or might not have been male. Nowadays, young men cultivated an increasingly androgynous style and wore their hair down to their belts. For anyone who wanted to be someone in the Mando-prog scene, the only other option was to shave their hair off and wear a skull cap. Short hair was out of the question. They could equally have been avatars, leaning over their guitars and bass: holographic simulations, even though that would have been hugely expensive. Only very successful musicians could afford avatars, like the American rapper Eminem who, now over fifty years of age and wanting to relive his heyday, had recently projected numerous versions of himself onto the stage, which played the instruments, danced, and unfortunately displayed much more agility than the master himself.
But all of this – gender, flesh and blood, bits and bytes – all of it lost any meaning next to the singer. Yoyo had combed her hair back tightly and braided it into four ponytails at the nape of her neck, which swung back and forth with each of her sinuous, powerful moves. She was singing a cover version of some ancient Shenggy track. As far as it was possible to deduce from the mobile’s mediocre recording quality, she had a good voice, if not a remarkable one. And even though the bad lighting didn’t put her sufficiently in the limelight, Jericho still saw enough to know she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had seen in the thirty-eight years of his life. It was just that Yoyo’s particular kind of beauty threw all the theories about what beauty was right out of the window.
The picture blurred for a moment as Chen tried to zoom in on his daughter. Then Yoyo’s eyes filled the screen – a gaze like velvet, slender eyelids, curtained by lashes which sank and then quickly lifted again. The camera wobbled, Yoyo disappeared from view, then the recording stopped.
‘She sings,’ said Chen, as if it were necessary to point that out. Jericho played the next film. It showed Yoyo in a restaurant, sitting opposite Chen, her hair loose. She flicked through a menu, then noticed the camera and smiled.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Well, I hardly ever see you,’ answered Chen’s voice. ‘So this way I’ll at least have you preserved on film.’
‘Aha! Bottled Yoyo.’
She laughed. Two horizontal creases formed under her eyes as she did so, which hadn’t come up in the psychologists’ beauty scenarios, but Jericho found them incredibly exciting.
‘And besides, that way I can show you off.’
Yoyo pulled a face at her father. She started to squint.
‘No, don’t,’ said Chen’s voice.
The recording ended. The third one showed the restaurant again, apparently at a later date. Music blended into the cacophony of noise. In the background, waiters were hurrying between packed tables. Yoyo took a drag of her cigarette and balanced a drink in her right hand. She opened her lips and let a thin plume of smoke escape. For the duration of the entire clip, she didn’t speak a single word. Her gaze rested on her father. It was one of love and noticeable sadness, so much so that Jericho wouldn’t have been surprised to see tears flowing from her eyes. But nothing of the sort happened. Yoyo just lowered her eyelids from time to time, as if wanting to wipe away what she saw with her heavy lashes, sipped at her drink, dragged at her cigarette and blew out smoke.
‘I’ll need these recordings,’ said Jericho.
Chen pushed himself out of his chair, his gaze fixed on the now empty wall as if his daughter were still visible on it. His features seemed more rigid than ever. And yet Jericho knew, without knowing the exact circumstances, that there had been times when this face had been contorted with pain. He had seen such faces in London. Victims. Families of victims. Perpetrators who had become victims themselves. Whatever it was that had hardened Chen, he hoped fervently to be far away if this rigidity ever broke down. There was no way in the world he wanted to see what would happen if it did.
‘There are more you can have,’ said Chen tonelessly. ‘Yoyo enjoyed being photographed. But the films are much better. Not these ones though. Yoyo made recordings for Tian as a virtual tour guide. In high resolution, so she told me. And it’s true, when you walk through the Museum of Town Planning or through the eye of the World Financial Center with one of those programs, it’s as though she’s there with you in the flesh. I have some of them at home, but I’m sure Tian can give you better material.’ He faltered. ‘Assuming, of course, that you’re willing to find Yoyo for me.’
Jericho reached for his cup, stared at the remaining puddle of cold coffee and put it back down. Bright sunlight filled the room. He looked at Chen and knew that his visitor wouldn’t ask a second time.
‘I’m going to need more than the films.’
Jin Mao Tower
Around the same time, a Japanese waitress was approaching Kenny Xin’s table, carrying a tray of sushi and sashimi in front of her. Xin, who saw her coming out of the corner of his eye, didn’t bother turning round. His gaze was resting on the blue-grey band of the Huangpu three hundred metres below him. The river was busy at this time of day. Chains of barges followed its path like sluggish water-snakes, while heavy cargo-ships headed for the docks to the east of the bend. Ferries, water taxis and excursion boats forced their way between them en route for the Yangpu bridge and the cranes of the unloading bays, past the idyllic Gongqing Park to the estuary, where the oily floods of the Huangpu mixed in a gloomy kaleidoscope with the muddy waters of the Yangtze before dispersing into the East China Sea.
It was thanks to the river’s sharp, almost angular bend to the right that Shanghai’s financial and economic district, Pudong, seemed like a peninsula, offering panoramic views of the coastal road Zhongshan Lu with its colonial banks, clubs and hotels: relicts from the era after the Opium Wars, when the European trade giants had divided up the country between them and erected monuments of their power on the western bank of the river. A hundred years ago, these structures must have towered over everything around them in splendour and size. Now they looked like toys against the stalagmite-like towers of glass, steel and concrete that stretched out behind them, permeated by highways, magnetic rails and sky trains, surrounded by whirling flying machines, insectoid minicopters and cargo-blimps. Even though the weather was unusually clear, the horizon couldn’t be seen. Shanghai went up in smoke, diffused at the edges and became one with the sky. There was nothing to suggest that anything other than yet more development was beyond the development itself.