Chapter 3A Voice Like the Time Signal

When Qingluan raised her hand to her eyes, the dark markings on its back had only just crawled past the second knuckle.

She did not lower it.

The hand had lifted itself. Something had been moving under the skin, up from the wrist bone, a stretch at a time. It was not fast, and it did not itch. She had turned the hand over to look at it, and just like that it had come up to her eyes. When the hand reached her eyes, the thing had just come to the second knuckle, and it stopped.

She had been sitting on this plastic stool for three hours. Her right heel had never come down to the ground. It was how she sat when she wrote, and if the heel came down she could not write. Now the heel was still raised, but it no longer pressed down.

The white steam above the pot was drifting upward at a slant. It stopped halfway and froze into a white line that did not move. The string of little lamps along the awning was still on. The fine dust under the lamps had stopped as well. Each grain hung where it was, exactly where it had been a second before. The oil in the pan made no sound. On the seventh table, the enamel bowl had a spoonful of chili oil just dropped in, and it had spread out at one edge. That edge had stopped two fingers’ width from the rim of the bowl and would go no further. On the elevated road a car was passing over a joint, and the sound of its wheels on the expansion joint had sounded only halfway.

In the same second, four other hands were also held up before their owners’ eyes.

On the glass of the last Tokyo train, a hand was held up before the eyes. Outside the glass, the tunnel lights had stopped on the third panel and would not move, and the markings on the back of the hand had stopped between the second and third knuckles. In the mirror of an old practice room in Seoul, a hand was held up before the eyes. Four fingers still held the shape of pushing up a jaw, and the white marks the nails had pressed in had not faded. On the stone steps of Paris, a hand was held up before the eyes. Between the thumb and forefinger was an old callus, and on the callus was a newer split, opened last week when the hand braced against the ground. In front of a pharmacy window in New York, a hand was held up before the eyes. The palm was clenched. Sweat had printed the thread of the thing inside onto the skin, ring by ring, and you could count them.

In the same frame, the five towers went completely still.

From the street, only the lower section of the towers could be seen. The eye followed the steel and glass upwards until, at a certain point, it could go no further. Beyond that was black with no edge. The bodies of the towers flashed five colours in turn: jade-white gold, shadowless fluorescent white, mirror-silver cold pink, gold-leaf red glue, banknote green-gold. Each colour lit only once. Once one had lit, it did not light a second time, as if five people who had not yet given their names had each shown their cards first.

Above and beside the towers, each city had its disc hanging in the sky. Shanghai’s was in the north-east, with three-quarters of it lit. Tokyo’s was in the north, half lit. Seoul’s was two-thirds lit. Paris and New York had only a crescent each. Across the dark part of those discs lay patches of broken light, one patch after another. They were the lights of another city, at night. Beside each of the five discs a black mouth had opened. Each mouth sat a little higher than its disc, and each leaned towards the side where the tower stood.

Then they all stopped moving at once.

For three seconds, nothing in the whole city fell. A drop of water hung from the lower edge of the iron frame over the awning. It hung there and did not fall.

※

The second beat was pushed out from all five towers at once.

A ring of something invisible came pushing sideways. The light boxes under the elevated road, the freezer doors of the convenience store, the empty sign on the roof of a taxi, a phone lying face down on a table, the row of screens on the platform still announcing the last train — every screen in the world went white in the same second, then came back as one single sheet of light. Whatever had been on them before, no one could recall after that second.

In that Tokyo carriage, the scrolling display above the door was announcing the next station’s name, and it changed halfway through. The Seoul practice room had no screens. Two screens from the convenience store across the street shone in through the glass and fell on the mirror wall, which reflected them back once more. At the Paris metro entrance, the ticket machine’s screen went white for a moment. Inside the machine the coins were still dropping, and then they had finished. On the shelves in New York, every price label was a small screen. Dozens of small screens changed at the same moment, with a sound of dozens of very light clicks.

On the screens was a stretch of glowing symbols. The strokes were broken, and the breaks were sharp. Nowhere did the edges fade. The light went right to the edge and stopped there. The distance between one symbol and the next was the same everywhere. So was the distance between the lines.

No one recognised the strokes.

Everyone understood it.

They had not understood it by reading. The stall owner put the bundle of noodles in his hand back on the chopping board. The fruit seller put down his scale. Not one of them turned to ask the person beside them what it said.

It had not come down from the sky. It was right against the ear, so close that the fine hairs inside the ear moved. It had no echo. When a sentence was finished, the sound was gone. No room caught it, and no wall sent it back. It was as calm as a time signal.

“The sky is too high. We have touched it for you.”

The same sentence. Each of the five heard it once.

In the stopped carriage, Mitsuki heard it pressing down beneath the station announcement. The announcement kept moving, and it did not. The two sounds did not overlap. One came before the other, each in its own place. Jaewon heard it fall in the middle of the beat he counted, a place that had always been empty. All his life he had given the stress to that empty place. Swan’s hand was resting on an iron railing. The railing was cold at night, and when the sound came the railing did not shake—she lifted her hand and looked at her palm. Andrew did what he always did: he looked for the source. He tilted his head once, then again, and tried all four directions. There was no direction. The sound did not come from anywhere. It was already inside his ears.

What Qingluan heard was the bones of that sentence: fourteen characters, with the gaps between them neither more nor less.

She heard one more thing—when the sentence was finished, the last character did not trail off. A person always leaves a little tail when they finish speaking. The breath is still there, and so is the shape of the mouth. It had none. It had been cut off.

Bowing the head had an order. The whole street bowed. Most people loosened first at the back of the neck, and the head sank two inches with it, and the eyes dropped last. Some let the eyes drop first, and the neck came after. Those people bowed lower, with their chins pressed right down to their collars. The fruit seller on the corner still held his scale when he bowed. The counterweight slid down the beam to the end, and he did not reach to steady it. A woman holding a child pressed the child’s head onto her shoulder first, and only then bowed her own. The taxi driver bowed behind the windscreen. Both hands stayed on the steering wheel, at ten and two, and did not move.

The stall owner rested the long-handled iron ladle back on the rim of the pot, and it gave one clink. Then he lowered his head. He bowed from the neck: the neck loosened first, and the eyes dropped last. In eleven years he had bowed like this many times, and the order had never once changed.

On the whole street, only Qingluan, by the awning, had not lowered her head.

※

It was not that she would not. She was counting.

Her grandfather was a storyteller. From the age of three she sat under the table. Above her was the tabletop, and on the tabletop lay the wooden clapper and a pair of sandalwood clappers. Her grandfather spoke above, and she listened below, her fingers tapping on her own knee. Before she learned to read words, she learned to read the beat: one strong beat and three weak. The strong beat came first, and the three weak ones came between. When she tapped one wrong, her grandfather did not look at her. He only pressed the wooden clapper down on the table. The tabletop shook once, and the hand on her knee knew where the mistake was. He had told her one thing: “The beat must not be rushed, and it must not be dragged. Rushing is panic. Dragging is laziness.”

One year, a passage in the book was banned. That day her grandfather went up on stage as usual. When he came to that part, he left out every word of the passage and kept the beat as before. With the words gone, the beat was still there, and that section was left with a gap of four whole beats. No one in the audience noticed. The teacups clinked as usual, and someone coughed inside those four beats. Under the table she heard it. The four beats were empty all the way through, with not one rough edge.

After the show ended she asked her grandfather why he had kept tapping. He was putting away the wooden clapper, and he did not look up. “Keep the beat. The words need somewhere to go when they come back.”

The storytelling hall closed later. The pair of sandalwood clappers went to someone else, and the wooden clapper was kept. It lay on old newspapers in a cupboard at home. In the year she turned nineteen she took it out and struck it once. Its sound was duller than she remembered, and the wood had dried right through.

She had been counting for twenty-odd years. When people spoke, she listened for the beat first. She could tell who was rushing, who was dragging, and who had stolen the last half beat from a sentence. In meetings she counted the beat of her superiors. When she revised, she counted her own beat—and tonight she had deleted the line for the seventh time, because when she counted the fifth version of that line, it had half a beat too many. The extra half beat was one she had put there herself, out of nerves. One more word, and it no longer sounded like her own writing.

When the tower spoke, she counted.

In that passage, the gaps between one character and the next were all the same length, one and the same count. She knew it by the third character. The six pips of the radio’s time signal on the hour work the same way: the first five are equal, and the sixth is held a beat longer. That extra beat is for listeners, so that they know the hour has come. There was no sixth pip in the tower’s passage. From start to finish it was one count. It did not rush, did not drag, did not steal, and did not leave anyone half a beat.

Too even.

Her grandfather’s words had been about people. People rush, and people drag, and both come out of the body. The tower neither rushes nor drags. When a person says a long sentence, they have to draw a breath somewhere in the middle, and the beat loosens a little where the breath goes. That little give is the person.

She could not lower her head. It was not that her neck would not loosen. As long as her hand was still counting, she had to keep her head up to listen.

Her fingers tapped twice on her knee. The beat they tapped was her own.

Half a beat out.

※

Third beat: making way.

That ring of invisible things pushed on along the street, and it pushed the watchers back as well. The plastic awning, the folding tables, the electric bikes and the roller shutter across the road all receded layer by layer, until they stopped at the corner. Looking back from the corner, the stall was only a patch of light the width of a palm, and the people were a few black dots in it. Looking up, the five towers stood a long way off, like five nails.

When the tower had said its last sentence, it stopped speaking. It did not threaten, did not explain, and did not repeat.

“Those who stand beneath the tower need never look up again.”

Once it had been said, it was gone. The street was quiet for two seconds, and nothing caught the words. The signs did not rattle, the glass did not buzz, and even the traffic on the elevated road had shrunk to one flattened, low sound. The place where the sound had landed was empty.

The lowered heads stayed down for eleven seconds. No one raised their head first. A boy of seven or eight had lifted his head halfway, and his mother’s hand pushed him back down by the nape of the neck, very gently.

The plastic awning shook again under the pressure. The string of little lamps along its edge swayed twice, then stopped. For the first time, the one spot of warm orange looked small across the whole street.

Qingluan stepped two paces out from under the awning. On the second step her foot came down on a patch of fresh concrete, and her sole stuck for a moment.

What she meant to say was the line from tonight, the one she had deleted seven times. After the seventh deletion she had lifted her finger from the delete key, only to keep the line until she could say it aloud.

She opened her mouth. Her throat moved once, and the row of arcs from behind her right ear to her collarbone tightened with it.

No sound came out.

※

From here on, everything must be seen from a great height. The longer you look, the smaller the people get.

The tower did not come down. It stayed where it was, and in all five cities at once it finished what it had to do.

Tokyo. The last train had stopped under the tower and would not move. The ceiling lights were so white they filled the whole carriage. Mitsuki turned round once in the emptied carriage, and there was no shadow at her feet. On her second turn she looked down at the floor three times. The doors sealed shut in front of her ahead of time, and her hand stopped in the air, seven or eight centimetres from the door.

Shanghai. A barrage of Harmony characters came pouring down through the gaps between the buildings, pressing down in rows. Qingluan had barely got out half a sentence when it was broken into strokes thirty centimetres from her mouth, and the strokes were sucked upwards. She said it again, and again it was broken.

“I only want to finish what I have to say.”

Seoul. The Mirror Stage rose out of the floor of the old practice room and ringed Jaewon at its centre. In the mirror panels his face was cut into one panel after another, and each panel could be replaced. Fill lights came on from four sides at once, and not one natural shadow fell on him.

“At which draft does it finally count as me?”

Paris. Red sticky tape crept up the steps in rings. It wound round the old trainer first, four turns, and only then went looking for the left foot. Swan lifted her foot hard, once. It would not come up.

New York. Price tags came down in drifts, covering his shoulders and back, the backs of his hands and the tops of his shoes. One had caught on the screw in his palm, and another on the dog tag with nothing engraved on it, against his chest. Andrew reached for the second shelf of medicines, and the price label went on to the shelf before his hand did.

“I can’t make this add up.”

Five beams of light joined high up into one whole lid, and below it only a thin layer of brightness was left. Pull back once more, and the five people grew smaller: a point in one carriage, a point beside a plastic stool, a point at the very centre of a ring of mirrors, a point on a single stone step, a point under one roller shutter. Pull back once more, and the five points each shrank into the lights of their own city, until they could no longer be found.

Five points, and none could reach any other.

On the tower’s side there was no more sound. It did not look at these five points, or at any other. It had finished speaking.

※

Andrew crouched down.

His knee cracked first. It was the left knee. The sound was dull, muffled by the flesh, and only he could hear it. Nineteen years now. Each time he crouched, the knee cracked first, and after that it stayed quiet, which was why he never steadied it with his hand. He crouched the old way: right foot down first, left hand braced on the knee, weight on the right leg. Once he was down, his right hand stayed clenched.

He opened his palm.

The screw was still there.

M6. On the thread there was a mark where a spanner had bitten, and round the mark the metal had worn bright from being turned in and out many times. It had come out of the knee joint of a prosthetic leg. The man who took it out had sat on the front step of his own house. He had turned it for four minutes with an adjustable spanner that did not sit right in his hand. Once it was undone, he put it into Andrew’s palm, said three words, and went back inside.

He remembered the three words to this day, and nothing else—that day the flyscreen door had swung back and knocked twice, and the second knock was softer than the first. He had kept the screw ever since. The skin round his palm was thicker than elsewhere. Gripping had made it so.

The tags were still falling. One dropped into his open palm and landed exactly on the screw.

He brushed the tag away. Once he had brushed it off, he did not stand up. He stayed crouched like that, palm up, fingers not closed.

The lid still pressed down overhead. The one place on this street that no tag covered was the patch of his palm.

※

Seoul. Jaewon let go of the hand that had been pressing his jaw.

Three millimetres dropped back. In the mirror the face returned to where it had been. His jawline was zero point four centimetres short of the standard—he had stopped counting at the twenty-seventh measurement, and every time the number was the same. Before, he had always raised the hand again after each measurement. This time he did not. He watched it.

Off-frame, in Tokyo, the station announcements ran underneath everything, with four stops still to go. Beneath the announcements was another sound: the dry rustle of a sheet of paper being opened out again. The leave slip lay flat in her hands. It had three creases in all, two old ones and the one folded tonight, lying across the sheet in a row, of uneven depth—the first was the deepest, pressed many times. The third was the shallowest, pressed less than twenty minutes ago. She moved her thumb pad from the first crease to the third, and the paper rose and dipped three times beneath it.

“Folded three times, it’s still what I wrote.”

From the steps there came one sound only: a shoelace being pulled tight again. It was the right foot. At the third eyelet she wound it round one more time, round the ankle, above the bone—she wound that extra turn so that the shoe would not come off when she jumped. She had done it since she was seventeen. The left foot did not need it.

Last was Qingluan. She set her fingers back on the keyboard and typed out again, exactly, the line that had been swallowed. Not one character was different, and the punctuation was the same. When she had finished, she did not look at it again.

The five of them remembered who they were on the same beat. They did not all use the same thing: a screw, a face, a sheet of paper, a shoelace, a line of text. All five things were small. All five were within reach.

None of them lined up on this beat. Some were half a beat early, and some were half a beat late.

※

Qingluan lifted her head.

Time had half stopped.

Raindrops hung a metre above the ground. The steam had stopped as a white line. The strokes of the barrage had stopped in mid-air, and so had the scraps of paper falling from New York. The tower did not move. The street did not move. Only she was still moving.

The gaze on her began behind her right ear. It travelled along the first ring of that string of concentric arcs, and slowly turned through a hundred and eighty degrees. The arcs had not lit. Not one ring had lit.

All the way round, everything was still. The bamboo skewer tube stood on the folding table. The enamel bowl at the table’s corner had not been touched by anyone. The long-handled iron ladle lay on the rim of the pot, handle outward, at the angle you could pick it up at without thinking. The stall owner still had his head bowed. The dark grey towel on his right shoulder hung down by one end, the long end.

Round to the front.

There was a film of steam on her lenses, from the mouthful of soup she had just taken. Behind the steam were her eyes.

A point lit up deep in her pupil.

Only one. The size of a needle’s point. Cyan.

It did not spread outward, and it did not light up her face. It stayed that size.

In the same second, a point of the same light came on in four other places: one in a train window, one in a mirror, one on the glass of a balustrade, and one in a puddle. Only the one in the puddle showed clearly who it was: half of Jaewon’s face in profile, from jaw to ear, with the earring whose break was ragged lying just beside the point of light. The other three were still only points of light. Not even a face had taken shape.

None of the four points moved. Each was as large as hers and as bright, each only the size of a needle’s point. On the street, still no one looked up.

Qingluan looked at the four points.

“…Did you hear it too?”