The Dog (20 page)

Beijing University Hospital was not far from Office Nine, but Zhou would leave the meeting as though he were pedaling back to the 505. He'd go two blocks south, a block east, before turning right and ducking into the hutongs that led to the neighborhood where his wife was receiving radiation treatments. It was November. Zhou had told no one at the workshop, not even Gu Yasheng, that she had bone cancer and that it was unlikely she'd survive. Did anyone ask after her? No. The work was ever-present. Who would have thought such bad luck would befall those good servants of the people?

Testing continued. In December a powerful tremor caused a shelving bracket to snap, sending a row of Cooking Oil barrels cascading onto the workshop floor. Several sprang leaks when they hit, and those brave workers who leapt in to right the vessels suffered chemical burns on their hands and arms. They were both back the next day, thick with bandages, their eyes bloodshot, puffy, as though they'd been dipped in fire.

Then, incrementally, there was some progress. Advancing, receding, like the shift of season, a surge of spirit-raising warmth would give way to days of slate skies and cold, but then the sun would return. In this manner Team One developed a method of casting a clear crystal cylinder, which could then be ground down to a book-size square. They'd cool the brick of crystal in the annealing furnace for two weeks, and then Gu and his welders would attack the still-searing crystal with the needle flames of their oxyhydrogen torches to release any bubbles before final grinding and polishing. It was an inelegant method, but the resulting cube was 94 percent pure, with only a few bubbles, a few wavy striations. Zhou put Team One into high production, and by the end of December they had an acceptable test blank to present to Office Nine.

On a gray January morning, Zhou set out for his meeting at Office Nine, joined by Gu Yasheng. Comrade Gu couldn't understand why, but Zhou had insisted on traveling by bicycle, and both wore woolen long johns, an assortment of scarves, padded army-issue long coats, and fur-lined hats with doggish earflaps. Gu had a nice pair of sheepskin gloves lined with lamb's wool, designed for J-8 pilots, a gift from a cadre at the Ministry of Aerospace. Zhou's hands, in synthetic leather gloves, had already stiffened into claws by the time they rode through the factory gates.

The test slab was traveling in the back of a PLA troop transport, crated in a straw-filled box. The soldiers riding with it smelled the straw smoldering. Just beyond the gates, the truck rumbled past the cyclists, pumping black smoke from its diesel stacks. Gu waved farewell. It hadn't passed his notice that they were among the only cyclists on the road. Packed buses trundled by, windows fogged, exhaust pipes smoking.

“Why are you punishing an old man?” Gu said.

“The air clears the mind,” Zhou said through his bundle of scarves.

Another bus passed them and Gu looked wistfully after it. The power lines over the street were whipping around, singing in the wind.

“Perhaps next week you could come up with another mind-clearing torture,” Gu said. “Starve me, then make me watch dogs eat pies. Imagine the clarity I could achieve.”

Zhou's usual route took him around the perimeter of Tiananmen Square, but Gu suggested they cut through. The southern end of the square was clogged with construction equipment and workers laying up the first level of Chairman Mao's Memorial Hall. As they pedaled past, Zhou couldn't help thinking that the hall would be completed on time, but his own failure to build a simple glass coffin would bring shame to the Task One project.

At the building on Huangchenggen South they wedged their bicycles in among the rest. Gu unstrapped his document satchel from his basket.

“That wasn't so bad, I guess,” he said. Somehow the exercise and the cold had relieved his coughing, and he felt loose-limbed, perhaps even a bit younger. It was the first time Gu had left the workshop in four weeks.

Zhou was frozen to the bone, moving stiffly. “Didn't I tell you?” he said, patting Gu on the arm. “You're solid as brick.” The older man did look healthy, indeed. He'd pulled away his scarves to expose his nose and mouth, which were steaming like a bull's. Zhou saw he'd drawn strength from the struggle.

Inside, they shed their coats and hats and were shown to a conference room by a buttoned-down young woman.

“Comrade,” Gu said to her, “is there a bottle for tea nearby?” He flashed his straight white teeth.

“Right away, comrade,” she said. She looked back as she went out the door.

Zhou shook his head. “You're spoiled. Who's ever said no to you?”

Gu thumped his chest and laughed. “Only my enemies.”

Zhou believed it, and he was glad to have Gu on his side. Yet he was ill at ease. Always wary, always watchful. The unwatchful didn't survive audiences with Central Committee members.

The slab had been uncrated in a corner of the room, and Zhou walked over to it and inspected it from several angles. It radiated heat, enough to warm his hands as he held them a few centimeters off the surface. Blackened curls of straw lay on the floor. It didn't look like much. A piece of glass. It did not achieve six nines. He bent down and counted bubbles, and knew that even as he did, more were forming.

“It's not cracked, is it?” Gu said.

“Of course not, comrade. It's clear as water, rated to six nines, and earthquake-resistant to magnitude eight! It's perfect.” He'd tallied twenty-seven bubbles so far, silver pinheads suspended in the crystal.

“Don't be nervous, little duck,” Gu said. “Vice Mayor Li once told me himself that you possess rare qualities.”

“Don't fill my head with shit. I'm just a humble worker.”

The heads of Office Nine filed in, Vice Premier Gu Mu at the fore. It was his first appearance at a meeting, and after Zhou got through the technical details of the report, the vice premier commended him in warm, miasmic tones, phrases worn from overuse, applicable to any situation. “The Central Committee praises your team's effort and charges you to carry on the fight.” When he finished, his mouth set into a tight line that stretched across his face like a guy wire. He rose and approached the slab. He touched it, and drew back his hand quickly, sticking his fingers between his lips.

“It meets the specifications?” he said.

“It is a test slab, Comrade Vice Premier,” Zhou said.

The vice premier nodded. He pointed at a cluster of bubbles. “These little frog eggs. The final product will meet specifications, correct?”

“Correct, Comrade Vice Premier,” Zhou said.

The vice premier bent down and examined the slab one last time, then sighed. “Engage in successful practices,” he said, and walked out of the room.

Zhou knew that Office Nine had lost faith in him. After the meeting concluded, Gu Yasheng was called into a room to speak with Vice Mayor Li privately. Zhou was left waiting in the hall like a schoolboy, and when Gu emerged, he told Zhou that other factories around the country had been instructed to attack the problem and achieve victory where the 505 had failed. Having already completed the task a month earlier under the vice mayor's secret order, the director of the 901 announced to Office Nine that his teams had completed the K9 optical glass prototype in record time.

Factories in Shanghai, Harbin, and Kunming were working furiously to produce test crystal blanks. Zhou asked Gu not to speak a word of it to their comrades back at the workshop. Like a good father, he meant to protect them from harmful knowledge.

Zhou despaired for his workers, and for his failure to lead them to victory. He stalked the workshop, standing sentry at the oxyhydrogen furnaces like a condemned man, sweat rolling down his face, his lab coat a palette of stains and burns. He stared into the blue-white flame, yet nothing came to him. He'd stripped his mind bare.

Like everyone, he looked like hell. His eyes had sunk deep into his face, which had the texture of a rotten apple, the skin slack, waxen. To be heard over the noise, the workers shouted, the effort igniting epic coughing fits. They were going deaf, anyway, and had come to communicate largely by resigned shakes of the head, mournful twists of the mouth. Zhou's exit through the workshop door to make his weekly report at Office Nine had become a ritual of hopelessness, the workers watching him go, cursing themselves for their failure to invent the groundbreaking methods that would save Zhou's skin.

Toward the end of February, the winds came hurtling down from the north, bashing Zhou as he made his way across town. By the time he arrived at the Office Nine building, his body would be numb, and he'd huddle by the boiler for ten minutes while his coughing subsided. When he entered the room to deliver his report, Vice Mayor Li Quan would sit motionless, his hands flat on the table, and, when the report was done, offer him nothing more than a perfunctory farewell. Zhou expected to be removed from his post any day, the workshop disbanded and everyone sent back to their home factories.

Lan Baiyu's health was declining, and Zhou's visits to her hospital room had become rituals of their own. These were final days. They were tender with each other, speaking only of their past together, the odd patchwork of their marriage. When she asked about Task One, he dropped his eyes and listed the latest failures. Though she knew it was embarrassing for him, she never failed to ask, and she listened with great attention, her head ticked to the side of the pillow, recording every failed test, every miscarried theoretical approach. Every once in a while she'd ask a question—something like, Were the bubbles silver or white? Zhou would think, answer, then go back to the catalogue, still fresh in his mind from his report to Office Nine. She'd urge him on, reminding him of his great successes in the past, the reasons the motherland had entrusted Task One to his leadership. After he left, she closed her eyes and moaned into the sweat-soaked pillow. Radiation treatments had fried her skin. Her thirst was unquenchable, yet she vomited out anything she drank. Her bones ached as if some horrible device were bending every one just shy of breaking. Her tongue was a salted slug, her eyelids sand. She clutched at the sheet. She knew she would die. That would be the way out of her predicament. But she couldn't imagine how Zhou Yuqing would find a way out of his.

Through the end of winter, Comrade Zhou continued to deliver his weekly reports to Office Nine: minimal progress. Did the workers notice a change in him then? No, of course not. They were ghosts all, haunting the workshop and rattling the furnaces. Morale was a dry husk. Zhou lost his wife without a word of complaint to his comrades at the workshop. Only a week later did he tell Gu Yasheng.

*   *   *

The annual sandstorms came in late March, spitting against the workshop windows and clogging the mainframe's cooling unit. It was in April that Office Nine dispatched Comrades Zhou and Gu to the Shanghai 133 to exchange methods and information. The 133 had been testing a special induction furnace, and reports had been positive.

Their orders came through in the morning, and Zhou and Gu had just enough time to collect their personal effects before catching the train to Shanghai. As it rolled south, the air became warmer, thicker, and at every stop along the way the food handed up by vendors got spicier. Zhou was quiet. He rarely turned his face away from the window. Gu had fallen asleep instantly, and his head rested on Zhou's shoulder. The heartbeat rhythm of the telegraph wire rising and falling, the plowed fields whipping by, walls, slogans, low adobe houses, pigs and chickens. The train creaked and swayed farther southward, revolutionary songs crackling through the speakers over the doors.

Zhou felt as if long-dead nerve endings were reanimating, coming alive to his grief. His seatmates, provincial cadres returning to Hangzhou, south of Shanghai, gossiped about enemies in their danwei. They were speaking standard Chinese, but their Shanghainese would break through from time to time, the sounds indecipherable, an echo of Lan Baiyu's childhood language. She'd learned perfect Beijing Chinese at university, but when she was tired she'd swap a sound here and there, a hint of who she'd been decades before, a skinny girl pulling her father's fishing net out of the greasy Hangzhou Bay.

The cadres paid Zhou no attention, which suited him fine. On his lap he held a cedar box with ornate brass hinges. He'd made it himself years ago, planing the wood from a gnarled hunk he'd found on a visit to Anhui. In the light from the window, the lacquer deepened and the wood glowed. It was a simple box that bore no inscription.

He watched the landscape in Shandong Province with unusual attention. Lan Baiyu had been sent to May 7 Cadre School there, and he took care to recall her descriptions, aligning them with what he saw now: endless fields converging in the distance, the impossible expanse of flatness. Flatness after flatness, perspective lines converging in mist. The land of a good people, she'd said. She'd been away then for eight months, and every week a letter had come bearing stamps depicting Iron Man Wang Jinxi, vanguard fighter of the Chinese working class. She'd never been shy with him, and the stamp was a private joke, after she'd one night in bed called Zhou an iron man. Political monitors read everything, so they filled their letters with revolutionary prose glorifying the workers and praising the wisdom of the peasants. Some of her letters were nothing more than long excerpts of the Chairman's poetry or admonitions to wage revolution with all his vigor. Neither Comrade Zhou Yuqing nor Lan Baiyu existed in those letters. The stamps carried all their passion and longing, more than they'd have been able to confess to each other had they been face-to-face.

When Comrade Zhou one day received a letter bearing the image of a giant panda, his heart plunged. He tore open the envelope, but was unable to focus on its contents. He held it crumpled in his hand and fell against the wooden table in his spare living quarters. He looked again. “Comrade Zhou,” the letter read, “aren't these lovely Giant Panda stamps the postal service has issued? I do miss the proud face of revolutionary hero Wang Jinxi, but do not fear: the Iron Man's red heat will burn inside me forever.” Like a man breaking through the surface of the water, Zhou gasped, his body rejoicing in the sunlight and the air searing his lungs. He became aroused, almost painfully so, and he loosed his pants and brought himself off in a hitching convulsion.