I begin to feel anxiety again, as though my fingers are wrapped around a handful of sand, leaking grains.
“You’re the other half of me, cloven by Zeus’s thunderbolt.”
The words sound to me like a curse.
She’s leaving.
She tells me that her rehabilitation period is up.
We sit in the dark. In front of us is the imposing mass of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, its snowy peaks reflecting the silver moonlight. Neither of us speaks.
The donkey-braying music loops again and again in my head.
“Remember that alarm clock on your desk?” she asks.
Although time sense dilation therapy is very expensive, the opposite procedure—time sense compression—is not. The procedure is cheap enough to be commercialized. Several large conglomerates have invested in it, and taking advantage of certain loopholes in China’s labor laws (and the complicity of the government), they’ve been conducting secret trials on Chinese employees of international companies.
That alarm clock is a prototype time sense compressor.
“So we are all lab mice,” I remember mocking myself at her revelation. Even my boss is a mouse—he also has one of those clocks on his desk.
“It doesn’t matter if you know the truth,” she says. “The theoretical basis for time sense compression does not exist.”
“Does not exist?”
“Theoretical physics says it’s impossible, so they had to base it on the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It’s all about intuition.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.” She laughs. “Maybe it’s all nonsense.”
“You’re telling me that my disease, this PNFD II or whatever it’s called, is the result of time sense compression?”
She doesn’t say anything.
But it makes sense. Time passes quicker in my mind than it does in the real world. Every day I’m exhausted. I’m always working overtime. I accomplish so much more in twenty-four hours than others. No wonder the company thinks I’m a model employee.
Clouds drift over and hide the moon, eliminating the reflected light on the snowy peaks. Everything grows darker like after they lower the lights in a theatre.
A bright red laser beam lands on the snowy cliffs—5,600 meters above the sea—now acting as a giant screen. The laser creates shifting patterns, telling an animated tale, the creation of the world. A myth has been bowdlerized to mass entertainment. I’m not in the mood to appreciate it. The dancing lights only make my heart beat irregularly.
Time sense compression is wonderful for improving productivity and GDP. But there are many side effects. The mismatch between subjective time and physical time causes metabolic problems that accumulate into severe symptoms.
The conglomerates that invested in the technology created the rehabilitation centers in China and lobbied to change the labor laws to institutionalize the idea of “rehabilitation”—and so hide the truth.
They discovered that those suffering from the side effects of time sense dilation and those suffering from the side effects of time sense compression can help one another, be one another’s cure.
“I’m the yang to your yin, is that it?” So her interest in me is limited to my value as a medical device. My middle-aged male ego is hurt.
“Sure, if you insist on thinking about it that way.” Her tone, at least, is compassionate.
“What about the donkey-braying music?”
“It’s a way to harmonize our biorhythms.”
I wait for her to stroke my ego by telling me that compared to her previous rehabilitation biorhythm partners, I’m better looking, more interesting, more special, etc. But she says nothing of the kind.
“What about the dogs?” I’m running out of things to say before she leaves.
“They started out as regular dogs. But because they’re exposed to so many patients with out-of-sync senses of time, the structures in their brains have changed.”
“I have only one last wish.” I stare at her bright eyes, like a pair of fireflies, in the darkness. “Come and look at the fish in the waterways with me. Maybe they’re the only creatures in this world who live real lives.”
The fireflies brighten. She touches my face lightly. “Actually…”
I silence her lips with my fingers. I shake my head. I’ve succeeded. There’s no need for her to tell me what she’s going to tell me, the three heaviest words in the world.
But she gently moves my hand away, and says three words, three different words.
“Don’t be stupid.”
I’m alone by the waterway, staring at the fish.
She’s gone, leaving behind no way to contact her. Sand pricks my palms. No matter how hard I squeeze, it slips away.
Fish, oh, fish, you’re the only ones left to keep me company.
Suddenly I feel an intense jealousy of these fish. Their lives are so simple, so pure. There’s only one direction—against the current. They do not have to hesitate, overwhelmed by an endless array of choices. But if I really lived a life like that, maybe I’d still complain. A man is never content with what he has.
Suddenly I want to spit at myself for my self-love, self-pity, self-obsession, self-self. But in the end I do nothing.
I look at one single fish: it’s pushed away from its school by the current. Once, twice, thrice. It falls behind, waves its tail madly, and returns to its position.
Fuck. It’s tough.
But wait.
Why is it always this one fish? Why are its trajectory and movement always exactly the same?
I wait, unblinking.
Two minutes later, that same little fish again drifts away from the school, again waves its tail madly, again returns to its position.
I lift the stone in my hand.
The stone falls through the holographic fish and sinks to the bottom of the waterway.
I have nothing left in my hand, not even a single grain of sand.
My rehabilitation over, I’m on my return flight with my not-so-healthy mind and not-so-happy body. The airplane hasn’t taken off yet, but the cabin is already filled with snores.
I guess some people at least have been fully rehabilitated.
Suddenly the idea of returning to that concrete jungle to struggle against my fellow time-compressors disgusts me.
The plane takes off. Cities, roads, mountains, rivers—everything recedes into a small chessboard composed of parti-colored squares. In every square, time flows faster or slower. The people below throng like a nest of ants controlled by an invisible hand, divide into a few groups, are stuffed into the different squares: time flies past the laborer, the poor, the “third world”; time crawls for the rich, the idle, the “developed world”; time stays still for those in charge, the idols, the gods…
Without warning, two fat hands belonging to a child appear before me, balled into fists side by side, holding the entire world.
“Left or right?”
I look to the left and then to the right. I’m frightened. I have no way to pick.
Mocking laughter.
I lunge and grab both fists and force the fingers open. Both are empty, both are lies.
“Sir, sir!”
The pretty flight attendant wakes me. Now I finally remember the origin of that dream. It was my cousin who tormented me as a child. His favorite game was to force me to guess in which hand he had hidden the candy he took away from me. He loved to tease me because I was always hesitant, always had trouble deciding.
“Sir, would you like soda, coffee, tea, or something else?”
“…you.”
She blushes.
I smile at her. “I just want coffee, black.”