Fred nodded, stifling a smile despite her laughter. He kept his eyes on the wave tank. He was pretty sure she didn’t really think it was funny.
“Everyone has to guess about everyone else,” he ventured at last. That was definitely true for him.
She bunched her lips into a little knot. “Maybe so,” she conceded. She thought about that and then dripped a drop of oil into their water tank. “The chink and the geek! Riding the pilot wave! Finding the dao together! Solving crimes and saving the world! Binge view the whole series!”
“I don’t like shows like that,” Fred said primly.
She laughed at him yet again, a real laugh.
They sat in the room sweating. He in the armchair, she stretched out on the couch. Breathing and sweating. The refrigerator grumbled a little less than half the time, in a tone about an octave lower than the whooshing hum of the window-box air conditioner, which was on a little more than half the time. The two were out of synch with each other. Fred was irritated by these noises more often than he would have liked. When either kicked on, he noticed both for a while. When the AC was on, it was a little too cold; when it went off, it quickly became too hot.
Qi shifted around the couch from one splayed posture to the next, groaning as she tried to get comfortable. She napped with her mouth open, looking like a little girl. She cooked spicy food. She marveled he could live on only rice, told him he would get sick, or terminally bored. That his capacity to withstand boredom was itself boring. She poked around in the various paperbacks on their shelf, trying one after another before tossing them aside. She stared at the ceiling. They were visited by a clan of small geckos that could hang upside down, and did. Fred wondered if word had gotten to his folks that he was alive. He wondered if his employers were trying to find him and help him. He wondered if Shor’s algorithm, which took advantage of quantum superposition to factor large numbers, could be used to define the temporal length of a moment of being. It had to be longer—it felt much longer—than the minimum temporal interval, the Planck interval, which was the time it took a photon moving at the speed of light to move across the Pauli exclusion zone within which two particles could not coexist: that minimal interval of time was 10-44 of a second. A moment of being was more like a second, he felt, maybe three seconds. Meaning each moment of being was, when compared to the minimal interval of time, a near eternity. Much longer in proportion to the minimal interval than the lifetime of the universe was relative to a second. Although it could be argued that the universe’s lifetime had so far been fairly brief. He wondered what the largest prime number he could recite aloud might be.
Qi went to the bathroom about once an hour. When she came out she was always a little flushed and restless.
“What are you reading?” she would demand of Fred, if he was reading.
“This one is called Six Scenes from a Floating Life, by a Shen Fu.”
She groaned. “A classic.”
“It seems interesting.”
“What does it say to you right now? What sentence were you reading?”
“‘The Sage taught us, Do not use nets with too fine a mesh.’”
“Please, no Confucius! Something else.”
Fred flipped the page. “‘Now the clouds are flying past me; who will play the jade flutes over May plums by city and stream?’”
She sighed. “We need a different book.” She picked up a tattered oversized paperback called Eight Dime Novels. “I hope this book cost eighty cents.” She read from a page:
“‘It was the tightest fix in which he had ever been caught, and his mind, fertile as it was in expedients at such crises, could see no way of meeting the danger.’ Oh dear how will they escape!”
“Read on,” Fred suggested.
“‘When all the wood was thrown in that the stove could contain, and portions of the iron sheeting could be seen becoming red-hot, he ceased to heap in wood. They were ready to run at any moment; the gold was always secured about their persons. “When it blows up, run!” was the admonition of the boy.’ Wait—first it blows up and then they run? How are they going to avoid getting killed when it blows up?”
“Read on,” Fred said again.
And after that they spent part of every day reading aloud to each other. They read all eight of the dime novels, each taking up about twenty pages of the skinny oversized Dover paperback. Lots of laughs there, although the frequent blatant racism also made Qi shout “See? See?” But she shouted just as much, and also laughed a lot, at a Chinese book of quotations from Chairman Mao, which she translated extempore for Fred’s benefit. For a day or two they alternated passages, her from Mao, him from the Dover, and then from a fat little bird guide, which he picked up after seeing a brilliant red bird out the kitchen window.
“‘People of the world, be courageous, dare to fight, defy all difficulties, and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.’”
“That’s his pilot wave interpretation,” Fred observed.
“Aha! So the pilot wave theory is Leninist?”
“I don’t know, what does that mean?”
“You don’t know—come on. Leninism is what I was doing in that basement in Shekou.”
“I see,” Fred said, though he didn’t. He read from the bird guide: “‘Rufous-sided towhee. Note the rufous sides,’ thank you for that! ‘Smaller and more slender than robin; rummages noisily among dead leaves. Voice: note, chwee or shrenk. Song, a buzzy chweeee; sometimes chup chup chup zeeeeee.’” He enjoyed making the sounds.
Qi then read, “‘All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful. Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again, and so on till victory; this is the logic of the people.’”
“From a long-term point of view,” Fred repeated. “But how long?”
“Don’t make fun,” Qi commanded. “I like Mao. Listen to this: ‘Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.’ You hear that?”
“I do,” Fred said. “But what’s correct?”
“Maybe you can learn that here, it’s the very next quote. ‘Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle to make things, the class struggle, and scientific experiment.’”
“Interesting,” Fred said.
Qi nodded and read on: “‘The history of humanity is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’ That’s Marx, as I hope you know, but of course you don’t.”
“Groucho or Harpo?”
“Ha ha. Listen to Mao here, this is important: ‘This process is never ending. In any society in which classes exist, class struggle will never end. In a classless society, the struggle between new and old and between truth and falsehood will never end. In the fields of the struggle for production and scientific experiment, humanity makes constant progress and nature undergoes constant change, they never remain at the same level. Therefore people have to go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, and complacency are all wrong. They are wrong because they agree neither with the historical facts of social development, nor with the facts of nature so far known to us, as revealed in the history of celestial bodies, the earth, life, and other natural phenomena,’ no doubt he is referring to your quantum world there.”