"Both of them were young?"
She nods, "And correspondingly more flexible than us elders. I really wonder if we shouldn't teach this to ten year olds." She smiles and I realize she is joking. "Truly, you cannot teach it to ten year olds, because in order to do it, you have to have experience with buildings, have to have buildings in your memory."
"When you do this, aren't you really an architect?"
"Yes," she says.
"I imagine architects do not really care for the idea."
She shakes her head. "No, there are also organic architects. They come at the problems from a different direction, but basically they do the same thing. But I tend to sacrifice aesthetics for engineering, architects tend to sacrifice engineering for aesthetics."
"Can I see some of the work of architects?" I ask.
"Of course," she says. She looks into the middle distance, her eyes drifting left as people's eyes tend to do when they are querying the system. "I had them print-out in your apartment," she says.
"So I don't get any time off."
"Ah," she laughs, "you are clever."
Clever in Mandarin means almost the same thing as sly. I grin and try to look wicked. Then I make more scribbles.
I do not confess to her how frustrating this whole process is. I am here by a fluke. The University charts our actual performance against our expected performance. Once I had a tutor, and that helped my grades. Then my tutor died and oddly enough, that helped my grades. I worked very hard. Everything else seemed sour but in the second semester I had a systems course and found something fascinating. I learned to tie systems into all my other courses. My projects were systems related. And I was tapped for a co-op job at Wuxi Engineering Technologies, where I would be working with systems, because Engineer Xi, who reviews applicants for co-op positions, read one of my projects.
It wasn't until the list was posted and people started to congratulate me that I even understood I had been awarded something, but for maybe the first time in my life, I have been succeeded at something. And now, I am failing. And wasting an opportunity for someone who could have learned this.
It is worst at night, sitting in that beautiful apartment, making scribbles, going over flimsies. I get cold, although when I access the system it tells me that the temperature in my room is in fact higher than normal. I wear a ridiculous sweater, one with leather ties, from New York. All I want to do is sleep, but I go back over the Wuxi Complex. How did Li Jian-fen learn to do what she does? On my black desk sits a smooth stone carved into a walrus. It was a Christmas gift from Maggie Smallwood the year I spent on Baffin Island. I thought that what I learned in Baffin Island tempered me. Haibao thought we were damaged. I thought we were simply different. Maybe he was right. Then again maybe I am just too old.
I imagine a space, a clean clear white space like light through ice (clarity and sadness and the round-eyed faces of the seals in Lancaster sound, but this is unfocused, as is the memory of Haibao's white clothes neatly folded by the broken window.) I try to hold that, but everything seems formless. All right, everything is formless, I let it drift, thinking, the building will form. A room unfolds, but it's hard to hold it, hard to concentrate without concentrating. The system has the capacity to hold it for me, just as it holds a building I am studying, but usually I am conscious of the system when I work with it. I am not even aware I have reached into the system's capacity, tapped the system's space.
For an instant I have vertigo, and then a complete lack of perspective. A multiplicity of options, substances to use for walls, shapes in my mind flowing and shifting like ice. Everything becomes mutable, nothing stable, there are no boundaries. I did not know the perimeters of my own mind because I never had any sense that there was any more than my mind but there is a sense of my thoughts fleeing out and out and expanding and I feel as if I am diffusing-
47 seconds. My heart is pounding. The scribble is complex, beautiful, abstract and inhuman. It has nothing to do with building, it has nothing to do with me. I am having a panic attack, my heart is racing, racing. I want to get up, get away, but I don't want to go out. I get up, go into the bedroom, lean on the chairback and take deep breaths, hoping I will calm down.
Deep breath. Hold a second, let it out. Deep breath, hold a second, let it out. I want to talk to someone. I don't want to be alone. My heart won't slow down.
Anxiety attack. What do I know about an anxiety attack? That it is unfocused fear. I sure as hell don't know what I'm afraid of, although I know what started this.
I call Peter, my hands are shaking as I make coffee and wait for the system to put me through. What time is it? The system tells me it is 22:41.
Peter is at work, it's morning in New York. I can't go home for another six months. I close my eyes and try a relaxation exercise (my thoughts skittering like dry leaves.) First, visualize a calm quiet place. But the place I imagine is the night landscape of Borden Station. The long inhumanly white sweep to Lancaster Sound, a black line of open water, and then the deep sky paling slightly at the horizon.
Go to bed. I leave my cup of coffee and crawl into bed behind the white gauzy curtains. It is a bed big enough for two. I leave the lights on, instruct the system to turn them off when I go to sleep and turn them on again if I wake up. I lie there awhile, listening to my heart pound, which makes me nervous, which means that my heartrate doesn't slow (charming little feedback loop) until finally I guess I wear myself out, and eventually, the fear subsides. I close my eyes and painstakingly imagine Peter's living room, his couch. I remember where everything is in relationship to me sleeping on his couch. I am sleeping on his couch. I am thinking about Peter and Engineer Xi. It is morning, and time to put on my red and black and go to work.
I feel normal, a bit tired but in the morning the room is only wearing in it's insistence that I am not back home. I take my latest scribble to Woo Eubong.
She spreads it out on her desk. "It's interesting," she says. "What is it?"
"It's 47 seconds in the system," I say.
"Well, that's something. It's a little like calligraphy," she says.
"Tutorial art," I suggest.
"A little flat," she says. "Too western. Maybe that's the problem, a western mindset."
I do not know if she is joking or not. "Right," I say.
I review jobs, but I am slow because I keep losing concentration. I keep thinking about Chinese calligraphy. Calligraphy emphasizes line, the variation of width and blackness in the stroke, flow. There's a lot of talk about the rhythm of the character. For example, when I write the English word 'talk' I don't cross the 't' until I finish the 'k'. A character is supposed to be a kind of circular movement. I tend, when I finish the 'k' in talk to drag my pen so there's a faint line from the 'k' to the crossbar of the 't'. In calligraphy the faint line is supposed to be implied. It can actually be there, a brush of ink, but whether it is or isn't, there must be a sense of the artist's brush moving in that connected, circular pattern.
I keep thinking about all of this when I am supposed to be checking jobs. Thinking about how calligraphy might be connected with imagining buildings.
Frankly, I don't see any connection at all.
On my fourth Saturday in Wuxi, I go to dinner at Woo Eubong's flat. It's a pretty place, less perfect than the apartment I'm staying in, but more like a home. Woo Eubong has two daughters-official policy is one child, but it's not really so difficult to get permission for a second.
I have spent a few hours in Wuxi, shopping, and finally paid a small fortune for a Wuxi teapot. Made of brown clay, the spout and handle are very realistic looking branches. Mine was made in the second half of the twentieth century, the really valuable ones were made before the Liberation, in feudal China. But it's still an antique. It's tiny and comes with four cups that look as if they actually only hold about a quarter of a cup each. The shopkeeper explains that the teapots used to be stuffed with leaves and the tea brewed was very strong. The four little cups sat in a tray and were filled by being splashed first with tea and then with hot water. The tea, he says, never had a chance to get cold. He wraps them, folding the paper so that he doesn't have to use any adhesive.