12

It was June. Chinese History Month. This year’s solemn 6/9 remembrance was heavy on fear mongering about the dangerous lethal problem of Uyghur domestic terrorism. The CCP media was using the occasion to gloat that they were the real patriotic Chinese in Xinjiang and their critics in the rural parts of Xinjiang were trash chuds with no internal monologue. The Forbidden Apple Store and all of downtown Tokyoville was draped in ads for the new iPhone 50 and more packed than ever with tourists.

On 6/9 the CCP media stations played the movie 6/9 on a loop all day, about that fateful day the American terrorists blew up the Najaiying Mosque. There was the Spaceship Girl subplot. She says her thing about how she wants to fly a spaceship. She gets blown up. All the sympathetic characters are Han and all the cannon fodder is Uyghur. At the end they kill the bad guys, who actually look kinda like Uyghurs if you’re paranoid like that. The only sympathetic Uyghur character suicides at the end to allow the ultimate heroes to prevail and then go back to their love interests, their reward for being heroes.

Nick walked the considerable distance—almost 2 miles—to the rented Faraday Cage in Oldlondowntownville. The building at the end of the block there had a large wall mural that had used to be a generic street art pattern. Now it was a mural of Big Chungus and Spaceship Girl doing synchronized Kung-Fu in traditional clothes, standing hugely over New Prime City. Above them was the title THE PROGRAMMER and the Netflix China logo. It was from the new reboot of their classic miniseries of truth from iPhone35time, about how Spaceship Girl programmed the original deep fake that became Big Chungus as her PhD project at NASA-Harvard Space Academy even though the haters said she couldn’t. That’s all Nick knew.

He also noticed a beat-up iPhone25time Nissan Altima parked outside with a bumper sticker that said PRO-KNIFE, ANTI-TERRORIST and a knife stabbing into a Uyghur man’s face. Fantastic.

When he arrived at the room, Nick looked around the shabby little trap above antique shop. The recording studio. The Faraday Cage. Beside the window to the booth the enormous sofa-bed was made up with DS Basics sheets and blankets. The retro iPhone30times Danny Doppa calendar was on the wall. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the Hongshan jade boat that he bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.

On the counter were a black Bodum electric kettle, two cups, some tea bags, some ground coffee, and a Chemex pourover rig, all provided by Mr. Tao. Nick put on the kettle to make tea, and then sat down on the other couch to grind up some Red Star Cannabis. He looked at the time on his offline phone. 7:20. She was supposed to be there at 7:30.

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly. He couldn’t afford this to begin with—270 Good Boy Points a month?? Of all the stupid things to waste your money on, this one was the one that would kill his social credit score the most. It was totally unaccountable. It was off-grid. No Neuralink. No suggested ads. No content tagged to location. No mentions online at all. It couldn’t be tracked, so it would surely trip some kind of algorithm and attract extra scrutiny. He would be surfaced in no time, for sure.

Actually, the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision, of the Hongshan jade paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table. As he had expected, Mr. Tao had made no difficulty about renting the room. He was obviously glad for the extra monthly income. Nor did he seem shocked or get all weird when Nick said he might want to bring a girl up there. Instead, he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the studio, one of them through the back yard, which let out on an alley.

Something else had also happened to Nick on his way to the room. He kept thinking about it. As he was arriving at the building, this local Uyghur auntie had walked past him, singing. She was a monstrous woman, solid as a Mongolian totem pole, with brawny forearms and an apron strapped about her middle. She had been going into the laundromat next door, hefting a plastic clothes basket overflowing with cloth diapers. She took a clothespin out of her mouth so she could sing along with the latest California Zephyr gigapop tune in her headphones,

It was only a hopeless fancy.

It passed like an April day,

But a look and a word and the dreams they stirred!

They’ve stolen my life away!

The tune had been haunting New Prime City for the past few weeks. It was one of countless similar gigapop songs memed into popularity by the Chinese Intelligence Agency. California Zephyr was one of their favorite industry operatives. She was half-Uyghur so she could represent the Uyghur voice and give her approval to whatever policy the CCP wanted to do. She loved the HERO Act. She also had lived in America, which made her cool with the Chinese youth. (She grew up with her father, who was an entertainment lawyer in Losangelesville.) She was also an extremely good singer/songwriter, who was always being compared her to Sinead O’Connor.

Nick had heard her more viral hits on TikToks and they were undeniable. This one was a protest song about a riot in the cotton fields outside Aksu that killed 5 XPCC officers. But she sang it so artfully that the song went viral as a top 40 hit. He could still hear the woman on the sidewalk singing and the scrape of her Crocs on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic. But in the room it was curiously silent. This was extremely rare and only possible because his Neuralink was not connected.

Folly, folly, folly! He thought again. It was inconceivable that they would frequent this place for more than a few weeks without something bad happening. But the temptation of having an off-grid trap that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after their visit to the Mattress King Mosque it had been impossible to arrange meetings. The hot take news cycle had been speeding up drastically in anticipation of Empathy Week. It was more than three months out still, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work to everybody. All the news narratives from the Chinese Intelligence Agency were really beginning to cook. It was all so fried it didn’t seem real. At this time last People’s Election cycle Nick was so blackpilled he could hardly leave his apartment. But this time around he just felt like he had a head injury.

They had planned to meet up the previous weekend actually. Before that they hadn’t linked for a while, then finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on that same Saturday. They’d agreed to go back to the Disney castle in the abandoned suburbs. But on the evening beforehand Nick messaged her on Signal to see if they were still on for the next day and got bad news.

“It’s all off,” she messaged him back a few minutes later.

“What?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. I can’t come.”

“Why not?”

“I have my period. It’s early.”

He sent her a meme of Spongebob with his eyes open really wide in surprise.

She said “LOL”

And that was the end of it. For a moment he was violently angry. It’s just a little blood, he thought. But then again, he didn’t really know, maybe it was a lot. Either way. During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been a simple act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but like really wanted. When she had said that she could not meet up, he had the feeling that she was fucking with him. But then he realized, hey, be cool. Remember what Hotan Ronnie always said: “sex is a want, not a need.”

It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event. A deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple on their tenth-year anniversary. He wished that he was walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to have sex every time they saw each other.

It was not actually at that moment, but some time the following day, that the idea of renting Mr. Tao’s room had occurred to him. When he texted the idea to egirlebooks on Signal she agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed, he thought again of the new meme trend of the quantum computer being represented with backrooms imagery. It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness just like the backrooms. It was perfect actually. The quantum computer. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, willful act, one chose to shorten the interval before he would have to go back there.

At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Egirlebooks burst into the room. She was carrying a hiking backpack that he had seen her carrying in some urbex videos. He started forward to hug her, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the backpack.

“Just a second,” she said. “I brought some more of that weed that makes me cum really hard.”

She threw the bag on the table and took out a sleeve of a ¼ oz of weed. When Nick opened it and smelled it he had a vaguely familiar feeling. It was this crazy like orange and purple weed with like all these crazy crystals in it and shit.

“From California again?”

“Yeah. I know someone. But wait. Here’s a thing of pre-rolls too.” She took an already-rolled joint out from a tin of them.

The whole room already smelled like the weed. It was so much better than the Chinese government weed, which was starting to make Nick feel cracked out when he smoked it.

“All the CCP officials smoke like this, believe me. Don’t worry. There’s nothing those swine don’t have. Nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people get caught with a baggie of coke, and – oh wait, I got a lighter too.” She took a lighter out of the bag.

Winston sat down at the table beside her. He opened another different plastic sleeve of her weed. It also smelled really dank, like dank as hell.

“Yeah, that one is good too. From the middle east. That one we got with the help of our friends the Kurds,” she said vaguely. “But listen, dear. I want you to sit over there and close your eyes for three minutes.” She motioned for him to go sit on the bed facing the wall with the window. “And don’t turn around until I tell you.”

Nick gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain over the window, into the empty recording booth. He closed his eyes. Suddenly he began thinking of the laundry auntie again. She sang so beautifully. He imagined her in the recording booth. Then in his imagined version of her, she started singing the California Zephyr song again, with deep feeling:

They say that time heals all things,

They say you can always forget;

But the blood and the tears across all the years

They twist my heartstrings yet!

She knew the whole song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there in the laundromat for a thousand years, folding laundry and singing this gigapop crap. She didn’t care at all that the cloth diapers she was washing were probably made by the same CCP cotton companies that used Uyghur slave labor. She didn’t make the connection at all.

It struck him as a curious fact that he never heard a member of the CCP singing alone and spontaneously, or even whistling. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, trashy, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.

With his eyes closed, he felt egirlebooks walk in front of him, then felt her get down on her knees in front of him. She unzipped his pants and took his dick out. Then she started giving him sloppy, with full gagging.

“MMmhmm.” She said, meaning “you can open your eyes now.”

He opened his eyes, and for a second almost failed to recognize the scene. What he had expected was just to see her sucking his dick. But she had also slid her red yoga shorts down so he could see the reflection of her bare ass in the window behind her perfectly, and what was most visible was that she actually had a butt plug in, a glow-in-the-dark kind, and he could see the reflection in the window of the glowing red star of Chinese Space Communism.

She kept giving him the sloppy. It was goated. Soon they flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge sofa-bed. The DS Basics sheets were clean and comfortable. They smoked the weed and then had sex.

Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Nick woke up it was almost 9 PM. He didn’t move, because egirlebooks was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or to the pillowcase, but a light stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. An offline notification lit up his phone, which was on the table by the fireplace. In the complete silence he could hear faint shouts of children floating in from the street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary. Surely that was just a fantasy from movies and TV commercials.

Egirlebooks woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the electric kettle.

“Do you want some more tea?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“What time does your apartment open again?”

“What?” he said.

“Oh I forgot you don’t do the timeshare thing…I have to go livetweet SEX at 10, but I can’t go back to my apartment until 12, so I’m trying to decide if I should go to the DS-Work or the gym—AH the fuck!”

She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm. Her eyes were as big as the eyes emoji.

“What is it?” he said in surprise.

“A rat. I saw him stick his gross little nose out of the wainscoting. There’s a hole down there. I scared him anyways.”

“Rats!” murmured Nick. “Fucking rats!”

“They’re all over the place,” said egirlebooks indifferently as she lay down again. “We’ve even got them in the kitchen at my apartment. Some parts of Mars Camp Bell are swarming with them. It’s because it’s hard to keep up with the like huge mountains of trash on the sidewalks. Yeah, rats…did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets you can’t even leave a baby unattended for a few moments. A fucking rat will bite it. And the really gross thing is…”

“Can we please not talk about babies getting eaten by rats?” said Nick.

“Why not? It’s just talking.”

“I’m trying to stay positive, to cleanse my mental.”

She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs around him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what egirlebooks had been saying when he cut her short.

Already the instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Egirlebooks got out of bed, pulled on her yoga shorts again, and made the tea. She lit the rest of the joint they had been smoking earlier. With one hand holding a cup of tea and the other holding the smoking joint, egirlebooks wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase (“all these books look like Elfbars”), talking about a YouTuber who did a DIY project with a gateleg table like this, plopping herself down in a ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining the calendar with a sort of tolerant amusement (“this is like InfoWars merch”). She brought the Hongshan jade paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the jade.

“What is it, do you think?” said egirlebooks.

“It’s Hongshan jade. From the neolithic age.”

“You don’t really think that, do you?”

“Why else would someone go to the trouble of making it? To give it to some farmers to sell for 15 bucks? The farmer probably sold a whole bucket of these for 100 bucks. There’s no incentives in the market like that.”

“Sounds like someone loves late capitalism.” She was doing irony. It was a cringe meme to blame everything on late capitalism since it had been going on for 50 iPhones now.

He laughed.

“Do you really think it’s worth any money?” she asked.

“It’s 1,000 years old, of course.”

“But you don’t have the certificate.”

“No, no certificate. Totally off-grid. Not in the computer. Not part of the algorithm.”

“So it’s not really worth money.”

“Well you could never get money for it, no. Unless it was like independently verified as authentic.”

“Yeah that’s really possible, though. Like what if someone invented an app that could objectively tell the age of a stone carving?”

“The government would just call it fake. The government would totally control it still. The app would register as really whatever age it was, then the government would like put a warning label on that result that said it was misinformation. Lol.”

She changed the subject: “You know, Patrice O’Neal had a great bit about the economy, where it’s like the way they get you is, they make your shoes 80, right? Then they jack it up to 140, right? Then you go AHHHHH that’s so expensive. Then they bring it down to 120. And you go ahhhh like you’re relieved now that shoes are 120. They was 80!!!”

Nick remembered this bit from the Patrice O’Neal Standup and Radio playlist. The bit definitely had more parts to it, but he couldn’t remember them… It was somehow connected to the Haiti bit that Mr. Tao had referenced…

He started thinking out loud: “That’s like the Patrice bit about like how the government controls the price of gas, and they just like take as much from the population as possible without people revolting, like always knowing just where the line is before people will riot… But like to do that, you really have to understand money. And like most people don’t. Then he says uhh…because to really understand money, you have to like let a part of yourself die, you have to like be really cool with suffering. Because like all the smart people who understand money are investing in all these companies after the Haiti earthquake, they’re over there, they want to go there and rebuild Haiti…”

To his astonishment, she capped the line: “…without the Haitians and shit.”

“That’s it! That’s the line!”

“Yeah, I’ve heard all the Patrice playlists. I like problematic content. I’m cool.”

“Oh man, that’s awesome. It’s really the best YouTube. I haven’t listened to it in so long, though. I always think of my favorite Patrice bit—it starts out ‘dating is like fishing…’ then the metaphor is like women jump up into your boat, and you throw them back… And then I remember the punchline at the end is…”

And then she said it too, at the same time, they said it together: “‘You ain’t even got no boat.’”

It was like two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after the part where the fish jumps back up into your boat again, before the punchline. Perhaps it could be dug up out of Mr. Tao’s memory, if he knew the name of the bit or what show Patrice had done it on.

“How’d you find the Patrice playlists?” he said. “The algorithm?”

“My grandfather. He used to play lots of American radio shows on YouTube when he was watching me as a kid. This was before the Great Firewall was abolished. He was canceled when I was eight. Sent to the iPhone-making camps for having torrents of the Black Phillip Show.”

“I remember radio shows. They were like a live podcast,” Nick said absent-mindedly.

She changed the subject: “I’ll bet there’s some food in here or something that’s attracting the rats. Next time we’re here I’ll do a good cleaning. I’ve been watching cleaning videos on YouTube. But for now I have to go so I can get to the office and log on by 10…”

On her way out, egirlebooks said, “you should ask for a free month or something since there was a rat in here. That’s probably not up to code.”

“Uhh I would, but…I don’t want to be a Karen.”

She shrugged. “Whatever you wanna do.” And she was gone.

Nick didn’t get up for a few minutes more. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the jade boat. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment that looked like a boat, but the jade itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost translucent like a milky gemstone. Was this thing really 5,000 years old? It absolutely could be. It was as though the surface of the jade had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere completely. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the sofa-bed and the gateleg table, and the calendar, and the steel engraving, and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and it was egirlebooks’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the jade.