FRAGMENT 106
A Go Board Without Lines
Fragments: The Noise Blocked by Lan Hui's Breathing and Heartbeat | Fingers Sliding Across a Phone Screen
Time & Location: Rainy Season 2024 · Kuta Beach, Bali
I brought Orchid to Bali.
From the air, the island looked like a vast patch of green moss floating on the sea, with only a few narrow strips of beach resort development along the coastline.
At thirty thousand feet, there were no happy people, no troubled people, no seekers of life's secrets, no tourists chasing pleasure.
Only a pale strip of shoreline protruding from the ocean like a pair of lips.
Kuta felt like a peasant woman.
Her skirt flowed gracefully, outlining the curve of her waist, yet it was covered in patches.
Small people.
Small restaurants.
Small massage shops.
Small tattoo parlors.
Small hotels.
Small supermarkets.
Small stores.
Everything seemed scaled down.
The most eye-catching objects were the wooden phalluses hanging in doorways and displayed in shop windows, large and small alike, mocking humanity's endless obsession with reproduction.
The setting sun spread gold across red-brick rooftops and green treetops.
The noise of the world was blocked by Orchid's breathing and heartbeat.
"Let's go see the ocean."
We walked to the beach.
The sea was turning black.
Above orange-gray clouds hung a thin crescent moon.
A saxophone somewhere nearby drifted into a jazz melody.
Orchid slipped her arm through mine.
The clouds gradually turned blood-red.
The color reminded me of blood running through my fingers.
The ocean became completely dark.
On the breakwater, an iron beast had bitten a gap into the concrete.
Wastewater poured from a thick pipe into the sea, producing a deep and unsettling growl.
Orchid tightened her grip on my arm.
We passed through the swimming pool area of a resort hotel.
Nearby, two elderly Westerners lay on deck chairs in their swimsuits with their eyes closed.
I could hear their skin rubbing softly against itself.
I guessed they were younger than I was.
Yet beneath those physical sounds came something deeper:
fear.
Fear of money.
Fear of time running out.
A middle-aged Western couple hurried past us.
The woman wore a red T-shirt.
Her back was badly stooped.
She shuffled along without grace, struggling to keep up with the bald man striding ahead.
It was difficult to imagine her in a wedding dress.
Curious, I almost quickened my pace to get a better look at her face.
Then they suddenly turned away at a right angle and disappeared.
"What are you doing?"
Orchid pinched my wrist.
"You don't even spare women like that?"
Then she burst out laughing.
I wanted to live a simple life with Orchid.
Just once.
We checked into a secluded old villa.
The lamps cast a gentle yellow glow across dark wooden floors.
Somewhere in the air lingered a familiar scent.
It reminded me of the Go tea room back in Chegongzhuang.
The room was large.
The furniture was old.
The oversized bed was neatly made.
The sheets and pillows had yellowed slightly with age.
Yet everything was perfectly arranged.
The bed looked like a Go board before the lines had been drawn.
Even the towels in the bathroom felt slightly stiff.
Orchid was delighted.
She sprawled across the bed without a care.
Her long skirt lifted slightly, exposing a stretch of pale leg.
A wave of desire stirred inside me.
I quickly turned away, not wanting her to notice.
"You should lie down too."
Her fingers slid across the screen of her phone.
"I'll have a cigarette first."
I left the door open as I walked outside, pulling a lighter from my pocket.
Then I looked up at the moon.
FRAGMENT 107
The Failure of the Piston
Fragment: Trying Not to Calculate, While the Body Strains / The Absolutely Silent Soundscape of the Bathroom
Time & Place: Rainy Season, 2024 · An Old Villa in Kuta, Bali
I sat beside the pool in front of the villa, watching the reflections of trees ripple across the water.
The banana leaves along the wall whispered to one another.
Mosquitoes glided through the air. Insects crawled across stone.
There were almost no human sounds.
“Hey. Come inside. It’s too hot.”
I went in, shut the doors and windows, and switched on the air conditioner.
Hummmmm—
The compressor rattled to life, its mechanical drone mixed with a strange cough that sounded like an old man clearing his throat.
She lay on her side.
The curve of her body reminded me of the distant mountain we had once watched together in Reading, Pennsylvania, six years earlier—graceful, quiet, self-contained.
The rise and fall of her waist and hips seemed fuller now.
Her hair flowed across the pillow like water spilling down a mountainside.
Her round face pressed into the fabric, slightly distorted, yet more vivid than the moon reflected on water.
A real woman had become a classical oil painting.
I lay beside her, staring at the old ceiling fan turning lazily overhead, and slipped an arm beneath her neck.
“For a long time now,” she said, watching the blades spin, “I haven't really been interested in anything.”
“Could it be depression?” I asked softly.
“What in life is worth being depressed about?”
The woman beside me suddenly dissolved into a handful of concepts:
wife.
mother.
Go player.
Then rows of zeros and ones.
I withdrew my arm and cupped her face.
“I love you. Do you understand that?”
“Pfft. Why are you saying that?”
My hands fell helplessly.
After dinner she lay in bed scrolling through her phone.
I leaned against the headboard with my laptop balanced on my knees, checking emails, reading news, running Khan’s Pumice, the audio-analysis software I had built.
“I’m going to sleep, you smelly lion.”
That faint sweetness in her voice drifted across the years from Pennsylvania.
“No sleeping.”
I rolled over on top of her and began undoing the buttons of her nightgown.
Her hands came up to help.
Before I even touched her skin, I had already calculated every possible waveform of her physiological response.
Outside, wind roared.
Rain hammered the roof.
I tried not to calculate.
My body worked hard.
She cooperated, yet there were no soft moans, very little movement—only slight tremors.
The climax never came.
I shifted position.
She grabbed me.
“Don’t stop.”
Still nothing.
The piston had failed.
Breathing heavily, I collapsed on top of her and kissed her.
“Ahh, your breath smells like cigarettes. Disgusting.”
Her hand left her breast and waved through the air.
Suddenly, everything inside me gave way.
Emptiness.
I rolled onto my side.
Silence.
More silence.
She got up and ran into the bathroom.
I scrambled out of bed and switched off the audio recorder.
Then I locked myself inside the storm.
The wind came in waves.
The rain came harder still.
When she had fallen asleep, I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.
An old man.
White hair covering his head.
Drooping corners beneath the eyes.
Sparse eyebrows.
Dull skin.
An age spot on the back of one hand.
At that precise moment, the bathroom’s perfectly silent acoustic field became a giant amplifier, feeding my most closely guarded frequency back into my own ears.
Clunk—creak—clunk—
My heart kept beating.
Yet it sounded less like a living organ than a worn machine whose metal teeth no longer fit together properly.
Dull.
Dry.
Like a rusted spring forced to turn one more time.
The sound crawled upward through my bones until my gums ached.
I touched the loose skin hanging from my body.
The soft flesh.
The elbow bones protruding beneath thinning muscle, waiting for some unknown future fracture.
In my eyes, only one thing remained hard:
Sixty-seven.
On the other side of the door, Lan Hui turned over in her sleep.
The sound of her hair brushing against the pillow flowed like clear spring water.
Quickly, I opened the faucet.
Water rushed from the tap.
The noise filled the room, drowning out the static of this aging carbon-based machine.
FRAGMENT 108
The Noise of Bali
Fragment: The Low-Frequency Law Beneath All Life | Hearing a Fly Smack Its Lips
Time & Place: Rainy Season, 2024 · Kuta District, Bali
We wandered through the streets, quietly absorbing the kind of human disorder that no longer existed in Beijing or Singapore.
No one could pull my ears away from the real soundscape anymore.
It felt like my childhood again, crouching beside the abandoned building inside Compound No. 7.
I no longer ignored the colors, compositions, and sounds of the world around me.
I wanted to listen.
Orchid no longer seemed entirely made of flesh and breath. She, too, had become something like a cluster of pixels drifting beside me.
Perhaps she was also a physical sampling device.
The roar of motorcycle exhaust pipes could not conceal the metallic violence of pistons detonating low-grade fuel inside their cylinders.
Nor could it hide the faint friction between a rider's body and the girl seated behind him.
Loudspeakers outside shopping centers blasted drums, rock music, festival symphonies, and electronic remixes.
Beneath them, I heard what others could not—the countless rhythms of breathing and heartbeats.
A man sitting on a stone bench held a cheap phone in his hands.
An Indonesian woman sang softly through its speaker.
His eyes followed passing pedestrians.
Occasionally, he would call out in a low voice:
“Massage, miss.”
Each invitation ended with the sound of saliva gathering in his throat.
“Massage, massage.”
Young women repeated the call one after another to people passing by.
These were government-regulated massage and spa businesses.
A two-hour full-body oil massage cost less than twenty-four U.S. dollars.
The noise overwhelmed both the wind and the sea.
Yet all that disorder could not disguise the low-frequency law beneath life itself:
Eating.
Reproduction.
The soundscape here seemed capable, at least temporarily, of loosening time's grip on human beings.
We continued exploring Bali.
At Tanah Lot, I watched Orchid kneel in prayer with complete sincerity.
At Nusa Dua Beach, I watched her walk alone across the sand, leaving a trail of footprints.
At roadside seafood stalls, we ate greedily together.
At the Beachwalk Shopping Center, I searched for a gift but found nothing that felt right.
I wanted to give her money.
Yet I hesitated.
In the past, she had sometimes refused it and sometimes accepted it.
I could never figure out how to help her without wounding that pure heart.
She would always say:
“Don't overthink it. I truly don't care.”
In her words, she enjoyed staying in luxury hotels but never adapted to a luxurious lifestyle.
She drove the Lexus SUV I had given her.
Yet she refused to buy a house.
She had almost no savings.
After her son was born, her expenses increased, but she never once asked me for money.
So I proceeded carefully, inventing one respectable excuse after another to place cash in her hands.
She always saw through my tricks.
She described them as moves in a game of Go.
“A game of love.”
Then she smiled.
“It isn't money that loves me.”
“It's you, big brother.”
FRAGMENT 109
The Fly Sings Off-Key
Fragment: The Low-Frequency Law Beneath All Life | Hearing a Fly Smack Its Lips
Time & Place: Rainy Season, 2024 · Kuta District, Bali
Orchid never played Go to please her opponents.
Whether in the secluded compounds of Zhongnanhai or in the most exclusive clubs of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the people she faced across the board were usually far more interested in her beauty and her sensuality than in the game itself.
What did I care about?
I didn't know.
I only knew that I could not help caring about her—
even if she were a stone.
“What are you daydreaming about now?”
On Orchid's round face appeared a kind of intuitive beauty that existed beyond calculation itself.
At night, we slept beside each other.
When either of us woke in the middle of the night, all we saw was the other's back.
We both understood:
the opposing star points on a Go board can never move closer together.
A fly followed us everywhere.
I never chased it away.
Neither did Orchid.
The little creature was nearly twice the size of an ordinary fly.
Its buzzing sounded slightly off-key.
I could hear it smacking its lips.
Oddly enough, I felt a trace of sympathy for it.
At a seafood restaurant, I ordered a steamed coral trout, a plate of boiled shrimp, and the vegetable tofu soup Orchid liked.
Sitting at the table, I stared at the bright-red fish.
I had no desire to touch the icy smoothness of Orchid's audio-code matrix.
No desire to endure the digital excrement of powerful men.
No desire to listen to slot machines rattling their endless provocations.
Instead, I listened to the exquisite sound of beauty surrendering itself to heat.
I felt the tiny vibrations of fish fibers dissolving against my tongue.
Real.
Simply real.
The shrimp arrived next, accompanied by a small dish of sweet soy sauce.
At last, the fly stopped watching from afar.
It landed on the edge of a plate and stretched its mouthparts toward a shrimp.
I closed my eyes and let it satisfy its hunger.
Or at least its curiosity.
I wanted to hear a wavelength of life more authentic, more comforting, than any algorithm could ever generate.
Perhaps it had eaten enough.
Or perhaps it had only tasted enough.
I knew a little about flies.
When they settle on food, they do more than eat.
Their complete routine is to spit, eat, and defecate all at once.
Quite disgusting, really.
Yet this one was different from the fly that had once landed on my face beside a pigsty in a mountain village.
That fly had belonged to a lower world, a lower frequency.
I, apparently, had become more sophisticated.
So I kept eating.
Smack.
Orchid slapped the corner of the table.
The fly shot into the air and disappeared.
“Hehe. I was just trying to scare it.”
She pulled a funny face at me.
