FRAGMENT 13
The Blackout Dance
Fragment: The Secret Sound of Fabric Brushing Against a Rising Chest | A Slow Dance Melody
Time & Location: Summer 1981 · Renmin University of China, Beijing
For the first time in my life, I appeared before the world with my hair dyed black.
I pedaled my bicycle hard through the crowds.
No longer unusual.
No longer conspicuous.
Like a Japanese ninja.
It felt wonderful.
The wind rushed past my ears, cutting through the thick infrasonic hum of power that forever lingered around Compound No. 7.
The dormitory erupted in laughter the moment I arrived.
Everyone wanted to talk about my hair.
"The White-Haired Girl has finally returned to the human world."
The line came from one of the revolutionary model operas everyone had known during the Cultural Revolution.
The seven other men in my dormitory seemed intoxicated by the imported Japanese dye.
Dopamine overflowed.
One moment they mimicked the accents of the “Great Leader.”
The next, they copied the lecherous laugh of the Southern bullie.
Then they invented stories about hemorrhoids on the Long March.
I filtered out the noise.
My instincts were occupied elsewhere.
I was waiting for the dance that night.
At ten o'clock, the event students jokingly called the Blackout Dance began in a large classroom.
Bed sheets covered the windows.
Desks were pushed against the walls.
A Sanyo dual-cassette recorder started playing Western dance music.
Da Guo entered first.
Several young women followed him, each from a different university.
He was my roommate, an eccentric character.
Keeping an exaggeratedly serious expression, he introduced them one by one.
The last girl was of medium height.
A ponytail.
Slightly parted lips.
A courteous smile.
She wore a plaid blouse and dark trousers.
The overall impression was one of dignity touched by pride.
“Lights out,” Da Guo shouted.
I remained seated.
I tried to focus on the melody.
But I could not shut out the sounds around me.
Fabric rubbing against skin.
Kisses.
Hands squeezing flesh.
Girls brushing away wandering hands.
Every sound floated clearly through the darkness.
A light suddenly came on.
The girl in the plaid blouse had slipped free from Da Guo's wandering embrace.
She walked directly toward me.
“Would you like to dance?”
“A quick waltz?”
I looked into her eyes.
At the same time, I heard the mysterious whisper of fabric brushing against the rise and fall of her chest.
The recorder began playing The Blue Danube.
Around us, every dancing couple folded into the shape of parentheses.
For the first time in my life, my enormous feet attempted to follow dance steps.
My partner and I kept a careful distance between our bodies.
Together we turned and turned, following the faint scratching rhythm of magnetic tape passing beneath the recorder's head.
Occasionally I stepped on her polished red leather shoes.
She only smiled.
Head tilted upward.
Looking at me.
Her ponytail slowly coming loose.
The lights went out again.
The music changed.
A blues number.
The surrounding noises multiplied.
Muted breathing from the boys.
The friction of hands against skin.
The silky sound of girls stroking backs.
Soft laughter escaping unwanted kisses.
And somewhere in a corner, a moan like a cat calling in the night.
The slow melody softened everything inside me.
At first I kept my arm straight, touching only her back.
A few steps later she moved closer.
Her cheek rested against my shoulder.
Chest against chest.
Leg against leg.
We swayed together.
Then the thing I feared most happened.
When my knee brushed the inside of her thigh, that softness, that elasticity, triggered the hunting rifle hidden inside me.
I released her immediately.
Stepping backward, the rifle brushed against her abdomen.
I bent over at once and hurried back to my seat.
She followed.
“Are you feeling unwell?”
“No, no. I'm fine. Go dance with someone else.”
She said nothing.
Instead she sat beside me and took my hand.
She would never know how long that hunting rifle remained at attention.
I forced myself to think about geometric figures.
Physics formulas.
The silent darkness of the universe.
Anything that might cool my body without betraying what was happening inside it.
She continued holding my hand.
I heard the irregular rhythm of her heartbeat.
I heard the subtle movement between her thighs.
I heard the tightness in her throat.
Something slightly sticky.
Something slightly restrained.
The lights came on again.
“My name is Bai Ying. Mongolian. What's yours?”
“Tong Tong. Class of 1980. School of Political Science and Law.”
She tilted her head slightly.
“Manchu?”
“Yes. Tonggiya Clan. And you?” she laughed. “You look more like some foreign mixed-blood than a Mongol.”
She lifted her face and brushed back her hair.
We fell in love.
At least, I thought it was love.
We met often.
I took her to restaurants.
I gave her fountain pens.
Red ribbons.
Gold-embossed notebooks.
I began visiting home more frequently.
Not to see my father.
But to search through the drawers and cabinets connected with his “work,” hoping to discover suitable gifts.
I found nothing.
FRAGMENT 14
The White Crow Wakes
Fragment: The Doppler Effect | A Mocking, Arrogant Laugh
Time & Location: Summer 1981 · Renmin University of China, Beijing
For many days, Tong Tong stopped answering my calls.
She no longer replied to my letters.
I returned to the dormitory defeated.
Da Guo leaned over from the upper bunk.
“Heartbroken?”
How could he know?
Of course he knew.
He had already slept with Tong Tong.
The third day after the dance.
The brutality of human affection nearly crushed me.
The White Crow awoke.
Man and bird sharing the same body, we began tracking Da Guo's movements, his words, his sexual exploits, searching for anything that might allow the authorities to classify him as a hooligan.
Any evidence.
Any mistake.
Any weakness.
Then I overheard Tong Tong nestled in his arms.
She called him a real man.
Bai Ying, she said, was merely a timid imitation Mongol.
A fake.
The wavelength of that feminine contempt struck me like a weapon.
Darkness flooded my vision.
I was taken to the small hospital inside Compound No. 7.
When I returned to school, I noticed that the girls around Da Guo changed constantly.
One word freed me completely:
Dirty.
Rumors followed.
Tong Tong had left school.
Had undergone an abortion.
Had abandoned her studies and married a minor official.
The divinity of the White Crow awakened an almost pathological curiosity within me.
I spent increasing amounts of time in the university library.
I sat beneath the dim lights of the reading room, turning pages no one else bothered to read.
Old paper crackled softly as its fibers broke apart.
Dry.
Fragile.
Dead.
Physical formulas filled the pages.
Boring formulas.
Dead formulas.
I stared at them and suddenly laughed.
A cold laugh.
A ridiculous laugh.
An arrogant laugh.
“Hmm.”
No one was better than me.
No one.
Those acousticians hiding in laboratories behind thick glasses spent their lives measuring decibels and hertz.
Decibels.
Hertz.
Numbers.
Numbers.
Numbers.
That was all they had.
They could measure sound.
But they would never hear the erotic overtone hidden behind a row of cloth buttons.
They would never calculate the half-hertz drift of hypocrisy buried inside Gao Yong's magnetic baritone.
That tiny distortion created by arrogance.
By power.
By self-importance.
They studied waves.
I heard destiny.
Human beings, in front of me, were nothing more than carbon-based sound machines.
Two hundred and six bones supporting a vibrating mass of flesh.
Every friction.
Every tremor.
Every collision.
Every hidden mechanical movement.
Nothing escaped my ears.
Nothing.
The circulatory system.
The digestive system.
The nervous system.
The reproductive system.
I heard everything.
The White Crow's gift for stripping away background noise, combined with its absolute instinct for cause and consequence, turned human beings into radios made of meat.
At any moment I could change channels.
A different voice.
A different body.
A different secret.
The surveillance teams inside Compound No. 7—hundreds of listeners working together—could never reach what came naturally to me.
Never.
No crow was better than me.
Not one.
The black birds screaming in the old locust trees could hear courtship calls.
They could hear danger.
They could hear the wings of predators.
That was enough for them.
Not for me.
All I needed was the right medium.
Then I could hear a cigarette butt landing on a Persian carpet several kilometers away.
I could hear Tong Tong.
I could hear the lingering echo of a vocal cord called Dignity snapping inside her at the height of desire.
I could hear it long after the sound itself had died.
I closed the book.
The White Crow trembled somewhere deep inside my spine.
No one would ever understand what I was.
No one.
They thought I was a half-blind cripple surviving under my father's shadow.
A weak boy.
A dull student.
A pale face hiding behind black hair dye.
They were wrong.
All of them.
“Hmm.”
I touched my ears.
My miraculous ears.
I removed my sunglasses.
Light flooded in.
The sampling overload returned immediately.
Pain.
A thin red haze.
The familiar burn behind my eyes.
I took a deep breath.
For a moment I almost felt grateful to Gao Yong.
And to Tong Tong.
Without them,I might never have recognized myself.
Without them,I might never have understood who was truly superior.
