The proposal came at the end of a session in late November, after they had finished with the day's work and she was gathering her materials.
"I want to move the sessions to my apartment," he said. He said it in the flat informational tone he used for most things, without any social softening around the edges of it. "The character card system cannot be moved, and we need direct reference access to the cards. The current arrangement requires me to reconstruct from memory what the cards say, which is slower and produces more error than having the cards directly available."
She stopped gathering her materials. "I would need to request approval from my director," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him for a moment. He did not elaborate, did not offer additional justification or reassurance, simply waited for her response to the information he had given. She had been working with him for six weeks and she was accustomed to this. "I will ask," she said.
Wanying said yes with conditions: all sessions formally documented in advance, all communications logged, no sessions after nine in the evening. She said this in the tone she used for conditions that were not open to negotiation, and she also looked at Wenyi in the particular assessing way she had, for slightly longer than usual. Wenyi documented the conditions in the project file and scheduled the first apartment session for the following Thursday.
She had been to the apartment building before, in the sense that she had walked past it: it was in the older neighborhood, one of the streets that was half residential and half the kind of small business that had been there for decades, a bakery, a hardware store, a shop that fixed appliances and had a hand-lettered sign in the window that had faded from decades of sun. The building itself was late-period, not particularly notable architecturally, but it had the quality of the older buildings in that neighborhood: solid rather than elegant, built to last rather than to impress.
He met her in the lobby and took her up in the elevator. The apartment was on the sixth floor. He opened the door and let her go in first.
She stood in the entrance and looked at the room.
It was, she registered, nearly empty. Not in the way of someone who had moved in recently or had not yet settled in, but in the way of someone who had made a deliberate decision about what they were going to have in a space and had stuck to it. There was no art on the walls. There were no photographs. There was no decoration of any kind that she could see. There were books, organized in freestanding shelves along two walls, organized by a system she could not immediately identify but which was clearly systematic. There was a desk near the window with a chair and a lamp and a small amount of very specific desk equipment: a notebook, a box of pens, a ceramic cup without a handle. There was a table with two chairs. There was natural light from the window, which faced south and in the late afternoon was very good.
And there was the card system.
She had seen the card system in session, had seen him pull cards from the portable subset he brought to sessions, had understood from those sessions that there was a larger system elsewhere. The larger system was here: a board on the wall adjacent to the desk, divided into sections by thin tape, covered in index cards. Hundreds of cards, she estimated. Every card was filled with writing in the small precise handwriting she had come to recognize. She walked toward the board and looked at the cards without touching them.
None of them had physical descriptions. She could see this from a distance, from the structure of the writing on each card: they were lists of qualities and behaviors and decisions, things the character wanted and things the character feared and things the character would do and things the character could not do and things the character had done that they could not undo. Some cards had relationship maps: lines between names, labels on the lines. Some cards had questions at the bottom: unanswered questions that he was apparently holding for the character rather than resolving before he knew enough to resolve them.
They worked for three and a half hours. It was twice as efficient as any session they had had in the conference room, because she could move along the card system and find the information she needed without any reconstruction or reconstruction-based error, and because he could reference the full card system rather than working from the portable subset. She moved between the cards and the manuscript pages with the ease of someone in a very well-organized room, finding everything she needed in the location where it was stored, and the scene they worked through resolved in forty minutes that would have taken two hours in the conference room.
She found, in the second hour of the session, that she was concentrating harder than she usually concentrated. Not because the work was more difficult, but because the work was happening in his apartment, and his apartment contained information she had not previously had access to, and the information was presenting itself continuously and she was having to make an active decision about how much of it to receive. The books on the shelves, organized by what system. The quality of the light at this hour. The specific arrangement of the desk equipment. The temperature of the apartment, which was slightly cooler than she had expected for November. She was noticing all of this and also making the active decision not to build too much from it, not to let the image accumulate past the point of professional relevance.
She was not certain she was succeeding entirely in this project, but she was trying.
At the end of the session he said: "Thank you. Today was efficient."
She looked up from the manuscript page she was annotating. It was the first time in six weeks of sessions that he had thanked her directly. The thanks was as flat and informational as everything else he said, but it was also precise: he was thanking her for a specific quality of the day, which was the efficiency, which was what the apartment session had provided.
"It was efficient," she agreed.
She gathered her materials. He walked her to the door. In the elevator she stood with her coat and her bag and the annotated manuscript pages and thought about the three and a half hours in his apartment and what she had and had not allowed herself to notice.
She called Muxin from the taxi.
"I was in his apartment for three hours," she said.
A pause. "So?" Muxin said.
Wenyi sat looking out the taxi window at the Qingdao streets going by in the dark. She realized she had expected Muxin to say something different, and she also realized she was not certain what she had expected, which was in itself a piece of information.
"Nothing," she said. "I just wanted to tell you."
"Then I am glad you told me," Muxin said. "Come Saturday. I want to hear about the card system."
Wenyi said she would come Saturday, and she looked out the window for the rest of the ride, and she thought about the card system and about the apartment and about what it meant that the apartment had exactly what it needed and nothing else, and she thought about the thank you, and she thought about efficiency, and eventually the taxi reached her building and she went upstairs and stood at her window for a while and looked at the harbor and went to bed.
She came on Saturday. She told Muxin about the card system: the hundreds of cards, none with physical descriptions, all with behavior and decision and what the character would and would not do under specific circumstances. Muxin listened with the focused attention she gave to things she found genuinely interesting, which was one of Muxin's qualities that Wenyi had always appreciated.
"So the cards are how he holds people," Muxin said.
"The fictional ones, yes," Wenyi said. "And possibly real ones."
"He wrote hyperphantasia on a card," Muxin said.
"Yes."
"Did you see a card with your name on it when you were in the apartment?"
Wenyi thought about this. She had moved along the board looking at the cards, had read the writing on many of them, had not seen one with her name. "No," she said. "But I was not looking for one."
"No," Muxin agreed. "You were concentrating very hard on not noticing things you were not supposed to be noticing."
Wenyi looked at her. "I was concentrating on the work."
"Both," Muxin said. She poured more tea. "Was the apartment the way you imagined it?"
Wenyi thought about this carefully, because Muxin's questions were usually worth careful thought. "I had not tried to imagine it," she said. "I made a deliberate decision not to construct it in advance."
Muxin looked at her with an expression that was interested rather than skeptical. "Why?"
"Because it seemed like information I should receive directly rather than construct speculatively," Wenyi said. "I was going to see it. It seemed better to wait."
"That is very disciplined," Muxin said. "Is that how you usually approach spaces you are going to encounter?"
"No," Wenyi said. "Usually I construct in advance. I have the room before I arrive in it."
Muxin was quiet for a moment. "So you made an exception."
"Yes."
"For his space specifically."
"Yes," Wenyi said. She looked at her tea. "I am aware of what you are suggesting."
"I am not suggesting anything," Muxin said. "I am observing. There is a difference."
Wenyi accepted this distinction because it was accurate in the specific way Muxin's distinctions tended to be accurate, and she drank her tea, and Muxin changed the subject to the new display she was building for the holiday season, and they talked about books for an hour, and then Wenyi went home.
On the walk home she thought about the deliberate decision not to pre-construct the apartment. She thought about when she had made that decision: sometime in the week between the proposal and the session, sometime during the evenings when she would normally have been building a room from everything she had accumulated about the person who lived in it. She had made the decision to not do that. She had not examined the decision very closely at the time. She was examining it now.
She thought: I made the decision not to build the image because I wanted the image to be what it actually was, not what I had constructed it to be. I wanted to arrive without a version already in place.
She thought: I have not made that decision before. Not for a space. Not for a person.
She walked the rest of the way home thinking about this and not arriving at a conclusion she was ready to name. The street lights were on and the November evening was cold and clear and the harbor at the end of the street was flat and dark and she walked past it without stopping and went upstairs and into her apartment and stood in the middle of it for a moment.
The apartment contained her books and her furniture and the view from the window and the specific quality of the evening light at this hour, and it was built exactly the way she had built it over three years of living in it, and she knew every detail of it without thinking about any of them. It was what a home was, she thought. A place that was already constructed. A place that did not require the active building that every new space required.
His apartment had been a new space. She had wanted to receive it, not construct it.
She thought about this until it resolved into something she could file, and then she filed it and made dinner and read for a while and went to bed, and in the morning she did not immediately examine what she had filed, and that was fine.
The sessions continued. The apartment had become the regular location. She came on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, at two o'clock, and he met her in the lobby and they worked for three hours and she left at five and took the bus home. The card system was as useful as he had suggested it would be. The manuscript continued to improve.
She noticed things she had not had access to before: the quality of his concentration when a particular problem was engaged, which was a specific and complete quality of attention that left no remainder visible in his expression, which was still and focused and produced no performance of effort or confusion even when the problem was difficult. She noticed the way he sometimes stopped in the middle of a sentence and did not complete it, not because he had changed his mind but because he had found the relevant information from a different direction and the original direction was no longer needed. She noticed that he made tea once during each session, always at the same point in the session, approximately ninety minutes in, and that he always made two cups without asking whether she wanted one.
She drank the tea. She did not comment on the fact that there were always two cups.
She noticed these things and she added them to the accumulation, and the accumulation continued, and the three partial versions continued to slowly become more coherent, and she continued not to examine what the coherence would mean when it was finally complete.
One evening after a session that had run a few minutes long, she was putting her coat on at the door and he said, without any particular setup: "Does it work differently in a space you are familiar with? The image-building."
She thought about this. "In a familiar space, the image is already complete," she said. "I do not have to build it because it is already there. A familiar space has the same quality as a familiar room in a book I have read before: it arrives without construction. There is no gap between the word and the room."
"And an unfamiliar space?"
"In an unfamiliar space, the construction is happening continuously, even when I am doing other things," she said. "This apartment was unfamiliar on the first session. It is less unfamiliar now."
"What is it like now?"
She considered. "There is a version of it that arrives quickly," she said. "When I think about coming here, the room appears. It is not complete yet, because there are things I have not seen or do not know, but the version that appears is no longer purely constructed. It is a mixture of what I remember and what I have inferred."
He nodded in the way that meant he was placing this information somewhere specific, in whatever organizational system he used for information about how other people perceived things. She had come to recognize this nod. "Thank you," he said. "That is useful."
"For what?" she asked.
"A scene I have been working on," he said. "About the difference between a space that has been inhabited and a space that has not yet been inhabited by the person who is in it."
She thought about this. "Like a new apartment," she said. "The first day. Before the person has put anything in it."
"Yes," he said. "And also before the person has built the image of it from memory and experience. When it is still something the person has to construct every time they enter."
She thought about this for the rest of the walk to the bus stop, and on the bus home, and after she arrived, and she thought: that is how I have been treating this apartment. As a space that is still being built. As a space I am not yet familiar with, even though I have been in it enough times to be familiar with it, because I have been deliberately not letting the image settle.
She stood at her own window looking at the harbor, which was a space she was completely familiar with, which arrived without construction every time she thought about it, and she thought about what it would mean when his apartment arrived that way.
She thought: it will mean I have stopped keeping a deliberate distance from what the accumulation is pointing toward.
She thought: yes, that is probably what it will mean.
She went to bed and let the thinking continue in the background where thinking continued when she was sleeping, which was where the slow conclusions arrived, which was where the eight-week timeline was completing itself whether she was examining it or not.
In the morning she thought about the inhabited versus uninhabited space distinction, which was the scene he had been working on, and she thought about how the distinction applied to people as well as to spaces: how there were people who arrived in your life already fully furnished and people who were still being built, and how the building was not a deficit but a different kind of presence, one that required more attention and produced a different kind of relationship to the thing being built. She thought this was probably useful to understand for reasons that extended beyond any single manuscript, and she wrote it in her personal journal, which was where she put things that were interesting but not professionally relevant, and she made coffee and went on with the day. And she thought: I am very close to knowing exactly what the accumulation is pointing toward. Sixteen words closer than I was yesterday.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The proposal came at the end of a session in late November, after they had finished with the day's work and she was gathering her materials.
"I want to move the sessions to my apartment," he said. He said it in the flat informational tone he used for most things, without any social softening around the edges of it. "The character card system cannot be moved, and we need direct reference access to the cards. The current arrangement requires me to reconstruct from memory what the cards say, which is slower and produces more error than having the cards directly available."
She stopped gathering her materials. "I would need to request approval from my director," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him for a moment. He did not elaborate, did not offer additional justification or reassurance, simply waited for her response to the information he had given. She had been working with him for six weeks and she was accustomed to this. "I will ask," she said.
Wanying said yes with conditions: all sessions formally documented in advance, all communications logged, no sessions after nine in the evening. She said this in the tone she used for conditions that were not open to negotiation, and she also looked at Wenyi in the particular assessing way she had, for slightly longer than usual. Wenyi documented the conditions in the project file and scheduled the first apartment session for the following Thursday.
She had been to the apartment building before, in the sense that she had walked past it: it was in the older neighborhood, one of the streets that was half residential and half the kind of small business that had been there for decades, a bakery, a hardware store, a shop that fixed appliances and had a hand-lettered sign in the window that had faded from decades of sun. The building itself was late-period, not particularly notable architecturally, but it had the quality of the older buildings in that neighborhood: solid rather than elegant, built to last rather than to impress.
He met her in the lobby and took her up in the elevator. The apartment was on the sixth floor. He opened the door and let her go in first.
She stood in the entrance and looked at the room.
It was, she registered, nearly empty. Not in the way of someone who had moved in recently or had not yet settled in, but in the way of someone who had made a deliberate decision about what they were going to have in a space and had stuck to it. There was no art on the walls. There were no photographs. There was no decoration of any kind that she could see. There were books, organized in freestanding shelves along two walls, organized by a system she could not immediately identify but which was clearly systematic. There was a desk near the window with a chair and a lamp and a small amount of very specific desk equipment: a notebook, a box of pens, a ceramic cup without a handle. There was a table with two chairs. There was natural light from the window, which faced south and in the late afternoon was very good.
And there was the card system.
She had seen the card system in session, had seen him pull cards from the portable subset he brought to sessions, had understood from those sessions that there was a larger system elsewhere. The larger system was here: a board on the wall adjacent to the desk, divided into sections by thin tape, covered in index cards. Hundreds of cards, she estimated. Every card was filled with writing in the small precise handwriting she had come to recognize. She walked toward the board and looked at the cards without touching them.
None of them had physical descriptions. She could see this from a distance, from the structure of the writing on each card: they were lists of qualities and behaviors and decisions, things the character wanted and things the character feared and things the character would do and things the character could not do and things the character had done that they could not undo. Some cards had relationship maps: lines between names, labels on the lines. Some cards had questions at the bottom: unanswered questions that he was apparently holding for the character rather than resolving before he knew enough to resolve them.
They worked for three and a half hours. It was twice as efficient as any session they had had in the conference room, because she could move along the card system and find the information she needed without any reconstruction or reconstruction-based error, and because he could reference the full card system rather than working from the portable subset. She moved between the cards and the manuscript pages with the ease of someone in a very well-organized room, finding everything she needed in the location where it was stored, and the scene they worked through resolved in forty minutes that would have taken two hours in the conference room.
She found, in the second hour of the session, that she was concentrating harder than she usually concentrated. Not because the work was more difficult, but because the work was happening in his apartment, and his apartment contained information she had not previously had access to, and the information was presenting itself continuously and she was having to make an active decision about how much of it to receive. The books on the shelves, organized by what system. The quality of the light at this hour. The specific arrangement of the desk equipment. The temperature of the apartment, which was slightly cooler than she had expected for November. She was noticing all of this and also making the active decision not to build too much from it, not to let the image accumulate past the point of professional relevance.
She was not certain she was succeeding entirely in this project, but she was trying.
At the end of the session he said: "Thank you. Today was efficient."
She looked up from the manuscript page she was annotating. It was the first time in six weeks of sessions that he had thanked her directly. The thanks was as flat and informational as everything else he said, but it was also precise: he was thanking her for a specific quality of the day, which was the efficiency, which was what the apartment session had provided.
"It was efficient," she agreed.
She gathered her materials. He walked her to the door. In the elevator she stood with her coat and her bag and the annotated manuscript pages and thought about the three and a half hours in his apartment and what she had and had not allowed herself to notice.
She called Muxin from the taxi.
"I was in his apartment for three hours," she said.
A pause. "So?" Muxin said.
Wenyi sat looking out the taxi window at the Qingdao streets going by in the dark. She realized she had expected Muxin to say something different, and she also realized she was not certain what she had expected, which was in itself a piece of information.
"Nothing," she said. "I just wanted to tell you."
"Then I am glad you told me," Muxin said. "Come Saturday. I want to hear about the card system."
Wenyi said she would come Saturday, and she looked out the window for the rest of the ride, and she thought about the card system and about the apartment and about what it meant that the apartment had exactly what it needed and nothing else, and she thought about the thank you, and she thought about efficiency, and eventually the taxi reached her building and she went upstairs and stood at her window for a while and looked at the harbor and went to bed.
She came on Saturday. She told Muxin about the card system: the hundreds of cards, none with physical descriptions, all with behavior and decision and what the character would and would not do under specific circumstances. Muxin listened with the focused attention she gave to things she found genuinely interesting, which was one of Muxin's qualities that Wenyi had always appreciated.
"So the cards are how he holds people," Muxin said.
"The fictional ones, yes," Wenyi said. "And possibly real ones."
"He wrote hyperphantasia on a card," Muxin said.
"Yes."
"Did you see a card with your name on it when you were in the apartment?"
Wenyi thought about this. She had moved along the board looking at the cards, had read the writing on many of them, had not seen one with her name. "No," she said. "But I was not looking for one."
"No," Muxin agreed. "You were concentrating very hard on not noticing things you were not supposed to be noticing."
Wenyi looked at her. "I was concentrating on the work."
"Both," Muxin said. She poured more tea. "Was the apartment the way you imagined it?"
Wenyi thought about this carefully, because Muxin's questions were usually worth careful thought. "I had not tried to imagine it," she said. "I made a deliberate decision not to construct it in advance."
Muxin looked at her with an expression that was interested rather than skeptical. "Why?"
"Because it seemed like information I should receive directly rather than construct speculatively," Wenyi said. "I was going to see it. It seemed better to wait."
"That is very disciplined," Muxin said. "Is that how you usually approach spaces you are going to encounter?"
"No," Wenyi said. "Usually I construct in advance. I have the room before I arrive in it."
Muxin was quiet for a moment. "So you made an exception."
"Yes."
"For his space specifically."
"Yes," Wenyi said. She looked at her tea. "I am aware of what you are suggesting."
"I am not suggesting anything," Muxin said. "I am observing. There is a difference."
Wenyi accepted this distinction because it was accurate in the specific way Muxin's distinctions tended to be accurate, and she drank her tea, and Muxin changed the subject to the new display she was building for the holiday season, and they talked about books for an hour, and then Wenyi went home.
On the walk home she thought about the deliberate decision not to pre-construct the apartment. She thought about when she had made that decision: sometime in the week between the proposal and the session, sometime during the evenings when she would normally have been building a room from everything she had accumulated about the person who lived in it. She had made the decision to not do that. She had not examined the decision very closely at the time. She was examining it now.
She thought: I made the decision not to build the image because I wanted the image to be what it actually was, not what I had constructed it to be. I wanted to arrive without a version already in place.
She thought: I have not made that decision before. Not for a space. Not for a person.
She walked the rest of the way home thinking about this and not arriving at a conclusion she was ready to name. The street lights were on and the November evening was cold and clear and the harbor at the end of the street was flat and dark and she walked past it without stopping and went upstairs and into her apartment and stood in the middle of it for a moment.
The apartment contained her books and her furniture and the view from the window and the specific quality of the evening light at this hour, and it was built exactly the way she had built it over three years of living in it, and she knew every detail of it without thinking about any of them. It was what a home was, she thought. A place that was already constructed. A place that did not require the active building that every new space required.
His apartment had been a new space. She had wanted to receive it, not construct it.
She thought about this until it resolved into something she could file, and then she filed it and made dinner and read for a while and went to bed, and in the morning she did not immediately examine what she had filed, and that was fine.
The sessions continued. The apartment had become the regular location. She came on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, at two o'clock, and he met her in the lobby and they worked for three hours and she left at five and took the bus home. The card system was as useful as he had suggested it would be. The manuscript continued to improve.
She noticed things she had not had access to before: the quality of his concentration when a particular problem was engaged, which was a specific and complete quality of attention that left no remainder visible in his expression, which was still and focused and produced no performance of effort or confusion even when the problem was difficult. She noticed the way he sometimes stopped in the middle of a sentence and did not complete it, not because he had changed his mind but because he had found the relevant information from a different direction and the original direction was no longer needed. She noticed that he made tea once during each session, always at the same point in the session, approximately ninety minutes in, and that he always made two cups without asking whether she wanted one.
She drank the tea. She did not comment on the fact that there were always two cups.
She noticed these things and she added them to the accumulation, and the accumulation continued, and the three partial versions continued to slowly become more coherent, and she continued not to examine what the coherence would mean when it was finally complete.
One evening after a session that had run a few minutes long, she was putting her coat on at the door and he said, without any particular setup: "Does it work differently in a space you are familiar with? The image-building."
She thought about this. "In a familiar space, the image is already complete," she said. "I do not have to build it because it is already there. A familiar space has the same quality as a familiar room in a book I have read before: it arrives without construction. There is no gap between the word and the room."
"And an unfamiliar space?"
"In an unfamiliar space, the construction is happening continuously, even when I am doing other things," she said. "This apartment was unfamiliar on the first session. It is less unfamiliar now."
"What is it like now?"
She considered. "There is a version of it that arrives quickly," she said. "When I think about coming here, the room appears. It is not complete yet, because there are things I have not seen or do not know, but the version that appears is no longer purely constructed. It is a mixture of what I remember and what I have inferred."
He nodded in the way that meant he was placing this information somewhere specific, in whatever organizational system he used for information about how other people perceived things. She had come to recognize this nod. "Thank you," he said. "That is useful."
"For what?" she asked.
"A scene I have been working on," he said. "About the difference between a space that has been inhabited and a space that has not yet been inhabited by the person who is in it."
She thought about this. "Like a new apartment," she said. "The first day. Before the person has put anything in it."
"Yes," he said. "And also before the person has built the image of it from memory and experience. When it is still something the person has to construct every time they enter."
She thought about this for the rest of the walk to the bus stop, and on the bus home, and after she arrived, and she thought: that is how I have been treating this apartment. As a space that is still being built. As a space I am not yet familiar with, even though I have been in it enough times to be familiar with it, because I have been deliberately not letting the image settle.
She stood at her own window looking at the harbor, which was a space she was completely familiar with, which arrived without construction every time she thought about it, and she thought about what it would mean when his apartment arrived that way.
She thought: it will mean I have stopped keeping a deliberate distance from what the accumulation is pointing toward.
She thought: yes, that is probably what it will mean.
She went to bed and let the thinking continue in the background where thinking continued when she was sleeping, which was where the slow conclusions arrived, which was where the eight-week timeline was completing itself whether she was examining it or not.
In the morning she thought about the inhabited versus uninhabited space distinction, which was the scene he had been working on, and she thought about how the distinction applied to people as well as to spaces: how there were people who arrived in your life already fully furnished and people who were still being built, and how the building was not a deficit but a different kind of presence, one that required more attention and produced a different kind of relationship to the thing being built. She thought this was probably useful to understand for reasons that extended beyond any single manuscript, and she wrote it in her personal journal, which was where she put things that were interesting but not professionally relevant, and she made coffee and went on with the day. And she thought: I am very close to knowing exactly what the accumulation is pointing toward. Sixteen words closer than I was yesterday.
You've reached the end of this chapter