“You are not married,” I say.
She smiles, not answering.
I shrug, taking a drink.
Only after I’m done does she lift her glass and drink.
“Not fair! You tricked me,” I say. But I’m happy.
“It’s your own fault for being impatient.”
“Fine, then I’m going to guess that you have insomnia, anxiety, arrhythmia, irregular periods…” I know I’ve been drinking too fast. I know I’m going to regret this, but I can’t stop talking.
She glares at me and drinks. Then she adds, “Whatever symptoms you have, I don’t. Whatever symptoms I have, you don’t.”
“We’re both here, aren’t we?”
She shakes her head. “You think nothing has meaning.”
“That was before I met you,” I say in what I think is a seductive tone. Now I’m just shameless.
She ignores me. “You’re often anxious because you hate the feeling of the seconds slipping away from you. The world is changing every day. And every day you’re getting older. But there are still so many things you haven’t done. You want to hold on to the sand. But the harder you squeeze, the quicker the sand slips from the cracks between your fingers, until nothing is left…”
Coming from anyone else, the words would just be pop psychology, pseudo intellectualism, cheap spirituality. But somehow, coming from her, they sound like the truth. Every word strikes against my heart, making me wince.
I drink by myself in silence. Her smile begins to multiply: two, three, four of her… I want to ask her something, but my tongue is no longer obeying.
She looks embarrassed. She whispers to me, “You’re drunk. I’ll take you back.”
So I’ve failed again.
It takes a long time for me to remember where I am.
During the time I’m thinking, the sun shifts through six window squares. It marches across three more window squares before I’ve washed away the smell of alcohol on my body and the vomit in the bathroom.
I guess Miss Nurse hasn’t taken good care of this patient. I have a splitting headache.
I don’t want to send a dog after her. Indeed, I’m a bit scared to meet her. Maybe she’s a telepath? It makes sense to have a telepath as a special-care nurse, right? Especially if the patient can no longer speak.
The biggest fear is for someone else to understand what you really fear.
A shar-pei enters my room and barks at me. I take out the slip of paper tucked into its collar.
She wants me to go with her to listen to robots playing Naxi folk music, which she’d described to me as a donkey braying with its balls cut off. She signed her note, “I’m No Telepath.”
Screw you! You bourgeois bitch! I kick the shar-pei. It whimpers.
In the end, curiosity overcomes fear. I wash, get dressed, go to the concert hall. She’s dressed all in yellow. I nod at her.
But she ignores my attempt to remain distant. She walks right up to me, takes my hand in hers, and drags me inside.
“Stop pretending,” she whispers in my ear. I have to struggle to keep from her how aroused I am.
They begin to play. It does sound like a donkey braying. It’s an insult to real Naxi music, the sort I heard ten years ago.
The robots swing back and forth, pretending to play all sorts of Naxi instruments, and recorded music streams from speakers embedded into the seats. The robots are clearly made in China: stiff, ridiculous movements; limited repertoire of gestures; monotonous expressions. Only robot Xuan Ke[5] is made with any kind of care for detail. Once in a while he even acts as though he’s completely absorbed by his performance. I worry that he’ll swing so hard his head falls off.
“I thought you didn’t like donkey-braying,” I whisper into her ear. The fragrance of sachets surrounds me.
“This is one part of our rehabilitation.”
“Yeah, right.”
I try to kiss her. But she dodges out of the way, and my lips meet her fingers.
“Back in your office, on your desk, there’s a tiny gray alarm clock. It’s shaped like a mushroom, and it often runs fast.”
Her tone is calm, but I’m stupefied. That clock was a gift from the company when I won Employee of the Month. How does she know about it?
I lost the drinking game—maybe that was an accident. But this…
I continue to stare at her profile. The donkey-braying music washes over me like a tidal wave. I seem to have also become a robot musician. I strain to play my foolish song of seduction, but she sees through me with no effort. I have nothing in my chest but a mechanical heart made of iron.
We end up in bed together.
She acts as though this is nothing special. But not me. A man is such a strange animaclass="underline" fear and desire are expressed by the same organ. For the former, he loses control of the organ and it lets out urine; for the latter, he loses control of the organ and it fills with blood.
Is this part of our rehab, too? I can imagine myself mocking her. But I don’t, because I fear how she’ll answer.
“Who are you really?” I can’t help myself.
Her voice is muffled, indistinct. “I’m a nurse. My patient is time.”
In the end she does tell me her story.
She works for a place called “Time Care Unit.” Only the most important men of the business world get to go there.
The old men are like mummies, their bodies plugged full of tubes and wires. Twenty-four hours a day they must be watched and cared for. Every day, all kinds of people come to visit. They dress in sterile biosuits and stand around the beds, communing with the old men, reporting and receiving instructions in silence.
The old men never move. Each of their breaths takes hours. Once in a while, one of them moans like a baby, and someone makes a record of it. Looking at all the biological signs, they should all be considered dead. The numbers shown on their machines never change. But they remain in that place for years, decades.
She tells me that they are receiving “time sense dilation therapy.” She calls them “the living dead.”
The therapy began some twenty years ago. Back then, scientists discovered that by controlling the biological clock of an organism, it was possible to reduce the production of free radicals and slow down aging. But the decay of the mind and its eventual death could not be reversed or halted.
Someone made another discovery: the aging of the mind was intimately connected with the sense of the passage of time. By manipulating certain receptors in the pineal gland, it was possible to slow down one’s sense of time, to dilate it. The body of a person receiving time sense dilation therapy remains in the normal stream of time, but his mind experiences time a hundred, a thousand times slower than the rest of us.
“But what does this have to do with you?” I ask.
“You know that women who live together synchronize their biological rhythms, like menstrual cycles?”
I nod.
“It’s the same thing with us nurses who care for these living dead, day in, day out. Once a year, I have to come to Lijiang to rehabilitate, to remove the effects time dilation has on my body.”
I feel dizzy. Time sense dilation is used on those old men because of the need to maintain stock prices or to delay power struggles among successors. But what if the dilation is applied to a normal person? I try to imagine experiencing a hundred years within a second. But my imagination is not up to the task. To extend time to near infinity is to slow it down until it’s almost still. Then isn’t the mind under such dilation immortal? What’s the need for a body made of flesh?
“Remember what I told you? I didn’t choose you, and you didn’t choose me,” she says, smiling almost apologetically.