The Reflection of a Typhoon in a Still Pond
The misaligned gears of a failing bureaucracy conspire to make a long dead emperor's parting edict a reality; some money loses its value and then is lost; the birth of a phoenix in captivity...
The following short story (below) is an example of someone (me) having an undeveloped idea and then overwriting it. I don’t think I pulled the ending off either.
It is also an act of procrastination, as I have reached a description-heavy part of my pirate novel that may also contain a number of plot holes, and am dogggedly putting off what I imagine will be a week of hard, mentally-taxing work.
Hào yáng feels the hovering muzzle of the rifle barrel move from the back of his head, where, in theory, it has lingered all his working life. It is like a well-fed shark idly looking for something to kill, raised to a state of inquisitive arousal by the iron buried within its own composition that it has mistaken for a source of fresh blood. Where it has gone next, he does not care.
The burning pressure that long ago seeded itself as a dull point in the base of his neck, where it assumed the attributes of a tumour, has miraculously evaporated overnight. Gelatinous pieces of his brain will not quiver like tepid fistfuls of shredded tofu on the cold waste ground of a prison yard. His kneeling body, cable-tied at the wrists, will not keel over as dead-weight into the bloodied fragments of his skull and the trailing rags of his face. His shrunken organs, that will now no longer be harvested from his corpse while it is still warm, have taken on a new lease of life, and are combining their efforts to process a drink that is like champagne. A foaming tide of effervescence pours from the heavy lip of an obscenely oversized bottle manufactured from dark blue glass, the spillage mostly captured in the metal waste paper bin that has been hastily kicked underneath. Dutifully, he raises his glass when he is called upon to do so. Occasions like this one demand the observation of a political etiquette. There is no sense in throwing away victory with a petulant display when he is this close to the finish line.
The success that is shared by him and his co-workers has only be been made possible by the failures of the others who came before them. Some, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, were made to pay a heavy and symbolic price for the non-fulfilment of their responsibilities. While no one who is present would dare to openly acknowledge this obvious truth, he imagines they must all be thinking it. Now that the long sought after goal has at last been achieved its must be reframed so as to appear flattering to its architects. It cannot be portrayed honestly as an unworthy end to a long, self-inflicted losing streak. It can only be the inevitable product of an efficient system operating close to full potential, hampered only by the scourge of human error, both accidental and deliberate. The palpable relief among his colleagues in the room lingers long after the celebratory atmosphere has burned itself out. Nobody wishes to becomes too drunk in case there are consequences later on. The gigantic blue bottle is soon abandoned, shuffled across the thin carpet to the wall farthest from door, where there is less chance of it being knocked over, the ghost of its contents slightly darkening the lower half of the glass. It stands only a foot shorter than his boss who loiters awkwardly alongside, unaccustomed to social gatherings, unaware of the unflattering comparison in height.
The wheels of bureaucracy turn dutifully and always to fruition. Many of the cogs that have fallen from their original positions in the crooked mechanism, still circle obediently against others in their vicinity, yielding uncertain outcomes, while delaying others. Finally, they have caught up to the decrees of an emperor who, were he to be reborn in this age, would discover the foundation of his power has been usurped and made obsolete; his edicts neither ignored nor abandoned, but hopelessly entangled in the red tape of an administration that cannibalises itself.
It has taken the legal system three-quarters of a century to embody a directive made during the final year of his rule, when his fading eyes had turned towards the shaping of a future that would not live long enough to experience: The birth names of the old empire were to be withdrawn from use. The children who were born henceforth were to be gifted with one of the new names, that the oldest and longest-serving of his astrologers had claimed would usher in an age of prosperity and agricultural abundance.
When the emperor issued his directive, the authority of the Royal Family was waning. If the provincial leaders were aware of the change in policy, then their footsoldiers did nothing enforce it. In the countryside the peasantry declared ignorance of it. Now that it has finally taken root in the books of law, it can no longer be safely overlooked. It is a cudgel whose weight may be weighed against the opposing hand and used selectively against troublesome individuals. To be found guilty is to be sentenced to prison and to have your child taken from you.
In the year that the given names of the previous century are retired by the Supreme Peoples Court, Jiàn Guó is born. His father – a secret royalist – has resorted to plying his wife with herbal treatments to hurry along the birth before the deadline consigns the old era to the pages of history. The boy arrives into the world during the twelve hour overlap where the past and the future peacefully co-exist and new parents may choose a designation from either age. Despite this grace period, the doctor raises an eyebrow at the utterance of a traditional name. His hand hovers reluctantly over the form as if he is being made party to a transgression that may be added to his file and, at some crucial moment in the future, be used as evidence against him. He glances hopefully towards the face of the exhausted mother searching for a sign of dissent, but finds none.
Jiàn Guó’s name leads people to believe that he was older than he is. He is commonly disregarded as a relic of the bygone Royal Era by his superiors at work and, despite his good record, is often overlooked for promotion. He once desperately fumbled his ID from his pocket to prove to a woman he was the same age as her, and not what she referred to as “a grandfather”. She ate the lobster he had purchased, then slipped away into the night, leaving behind a fake telephone number.
When Jiàn Guó is thirty years old, he is dispatched from his office in Héliúzhījiān to address over-crowding at the prison in Shāmòyǐnán, in the north-eastern corner of the Province. Under normal circumstances he would delegate the task. In this instance, the instruction has originated not from his boss, but from a man much higher in the echelons of the Party. Jiàn Guó concludes that it is better that he oversees the matter in person. Suspecting that his boss has been left out of the loop, he does not tell him where he is going. Instead, he takes a prolonged leave of absence under the pretence of attending to a pressing family matter.
Accompany him is a leather satchel that has been neatly stocked with bundles of high denomination banknotes. In a tedious afternoon session, he is compelled to stand at the centre of a large, empty room, and watch as the money is counted out before him, each note passing hand to hand along a chain of three silent women, who record the serial numbers in triplicate on identical forms. Should he feel that it is necessary, he has been authorised to use these funds to purchase the materials and labour required to bring about the construction of additional buildings at the prison. He has decided that, if this is necessary, then he will oversee the project personally. He will ask his benefactor to settle the issue of his delayed return to his ordinary duties.
The journey across the province by bus takes him three days to complete. The shiny brown skin of the leather satchel, that he keeps slung across his chest, reflects a patch of his sweat back onto his trouser leg. The value of the money at his disposal is draining away by the minute, like the sand through an hourglass, as inflation continues to spiral upward. On the first night, he dines alone in a restaurant where the menu is presented to him in a tasselled leather binder. The prices alongside the dishes have been crossed-out multiple times and replaced by a succession of escalating figures that reflect the rising price of food. He leaves the menu wide open on the table while he visits the toilet. When he returns, from a distance the dark blots on the cream-coloured paper resemble a colony of dead flies that have been struck down in the same moment by a mysterious, unseen force.
Later that night, in his dreams, he sees the canonical number that is the total value of the banknotes indelibly recorded in black ink, witnessed by three signatories and by his own signature which appears in handwriting that is not his. The practical value of the slush fund is already significantly lower than it was a few days ago, and will be lower still should he return with the contents of the satchel unspent. He wonders whether it would be better to purchase materials for the buildings regardless of whether they are needed. Concrete and good quality timber may hold their worth better than currency.
From the dusty window of the bus, he see a little girl dressed in an orange tracksuit top, walking by the roadside. She glances up at the rumbling vehicle as its low gears bite into the upcurving gradient. For a moment their eyes meet. Her face is a mask of shame; her short hair pulled into the tufts of pigtails. She is over-burdened by a double armful of long sticks that she cradles like an infant across her chest.
Striding angrily a few paces further along the road, there is a taller girl who is dressed entirely in pink. Pink jeans, day-glo pink fleece jacket, pastel pink woollen hat. She clasps her own bundle of sticks diagonally across her chest as if they are an arsenal of rifles salvaged from the bodies of dead revolutionaries.
The road plateaus. Though they remain at a high altitude it feels like they are in the lowlands. A pair of slate-grey trousers dangle by the scruff of their waistline from a crooked wooden pole that was once the limb of a tree. The skinned branch has been lashed into a fragile scaffold that is supported by a ramshackle building that may be a barn or a house, or perhaps both. The flies of the trousers have been left undone. The two pieces of zippered cloth have peeled back to reveal the discoloured, off-white interior lining.
In a nearby village, bushels of spindly branches have been leaned up against the short-side of a house where their wiry tips scratch against the overhang of the eves. The forest is being cut into manageable pieces, brought out of itself, and into human settlements where it may serve a practical purpose; one greater than that bestowed upon it by nature.
On the morning of the second day, he gazes down onto a territorial landscape of rice paddies; some that are abundant with growth; others that are no more than soupy blank-faced ponds; their strange outlines determined by the fracturing of family inheritances into smaller and smaller pieces.
The acutely-angled slate roofs that huddle chaotically on the valley floor closely resemble a mound of coal that might be scooped up en masse and carried away to another part of the country to be burned. On the outskirts there are a pair of O-shaped low-rise blocks of flats that, at first, he mistakes for twin football stadiums. An hour later, when they are at eye level with the town, he notes the uniform furrows between the sloping columns of the roof tiles. The grey walls of the houses are shedding their whitewash, the fading paint clinging doggedly to the mortared gaps between the bricks, showing the skeletons of the starved buildings. A long station house, with grubby fabric box-awnings protruding from each of the narrow windows on the first floor, is hidden in part behind a drooping entanglement of grimy black cables, thicker and filthier than old cobweb, draped heavily between wooden telegraph poles.
Shāmòyǐnán is a city that has erased it own history, where any expression of culture has been pinched off at whatever level is deemed as functional. Endless white apartment blocks, each ten-storeys high, and of identical design extend in every direction, separated by broad grey avenues.
Following two days of investigation, Jiàn Guó has tracked down the water pipes that went missing a year ago from one of the cell blocks. They have been moved to a block where the higher status prisoners are housed. The addition of these pipes to the piecemeal central heating system is made evident by the plaster joins that are patched at crude angles across the grimy walls. The entire prison is in a perpetual state of metamorphosis where materials from one part are cannibalised to bolster another.
The older buildings are modified barns constructed during the 1950s when the area was a cattle farm. With the exception of the perimeter walls, which are modern and well-maintained, nothing new has been formally built on the site since the 1980s. The yard is unlevelled waste ground. Here and there are small mounds of grey gravel of uncertain origin. Jiàn Guó wonders how it is they have remained intact. A guard tells him that anyone who is caught disturbing the stone piles is given 60 days in solitary confinement. He does not know either where the gravel came from, or what purpose it might once have been intended to serve.
In the morning there are lectures on Confucianism. These are given either by the governor, one of the senior members of his staff, or by a visiting scholar. The prisoners sit in rows on low rectangular stools that are made from blue plastic. Among their number are two men who have been sentenced to death:
“We knew she was a serious woman when we found poison in the Utsu Jar” one of these men is reported to have said at his trial. “We regretted burgling her and raping her. We feared that her two sons would come after us, so we found where they lived and we killed them as well.”
Everywhere Jiàn Guó has been beyond Héliúzhījiān he has laid eyes on utsu jars. They are stored discretely in a nook, or on a high shelf above a door lintel. Even the modern buildings that comprise Shāmòyǐnán in its entirety incorporate this feature into the design of the apartments. The jars contain doses of poison. The type varies. Mostly the toxins are organic, though in highly-industrialised areas they may be derived from factory by-products.
Traditionally, the poison is intended to avenge the deaths of loved ones, although more often than not it is used for suicide, particularly among the elderly.
Jiàn Guó recalls a rare sighting of an utsu jar in Héliúzhījiān, where the law regarding the illegality of such things is enforced.. An elderly woman claimed she been beaten by her state-appointed carer:
“She cries all the time because she no longer wants to live, but is unable to reach the jar of poison,” the nurse told him. “She begs me to help her die, but I do not want to go to prison for the rest of my life. Her sadness is contagious. She has ruined my relationship with my husband.”
After the lecture, Jiàn Guó talks to the governor:
“These two men who were sentenced to die six months ago. Why have they not been executed?”
The governor embodies the fixed inner calm of a man who knows his place in the world.
“There are family of the victims in Shāngōng – a nephew and two nieces. One of the nieces is a senior member of the Party. They are petitioning the courts to have the men poisoned to death, in accordance to what they believe would have been their aunt's wishes.”
One of the condemned men has caught a glimpse of the money that lies, like buried treasure, underneath the flap of the satchel. After Jiàn Guó separates from the governor, it is this man who attacks him. During the scuffle the leather bag is torn open. The banknotes are carried upward by the wind like an escaping flock of birds, scattering in all directions. The guards and the prisoners, forgetting their respective roles, chase after the money. What has been an anchor stone around the neck of its bearer, in its liberated state has come to represent freedom.
“Now we are both dead men,” says the convict.
That afternoon, Jiàn Guó has him shot dead in front of the other prisoners.
Jiàn Guó knows that he must recoup the money he has lost. Every missing note must be accounted for. Out of this necessity he has transformed the prison into a labour camp. He uses what remains of the banknotes in the satchel to fund the construction of a small factory building. Before it is even up and running, he has negotiated a contract with a western company for the production of self-watering plant pots.
On paper he still works at the office in Héliúzhījiān, though he has not set foot in the city in over a year. His boss has been moved on to other responsibilites. There is a rumour he has been arrested for corruption and is being held in prison until he identifies his co-conspirators.
Jiàn Guó sometimes ponders his own cloudy future. It is naïve to presume that the Party is unaware of his present circumstances. There are spies in the prison, as there are in all walks of life. He has quietly identified men - guards and inmates - who he suspects are watching him. Yet he has not been arrested. Perhaps, if the factory is successful and he can make back the money, he will be quiety pardoned. There remains a possibilty that his initaitve might be looked upon favourably and result in him advancing up through the ranks. If he fails, then it is likely that he will end up a prisoner, working on the production line that he established. He keeps an utsu jar above the door of his bedroom for just such an eventuality.
For every sixteen blocks in Shāmòyǐnán there is an identical park. One morning, Jiàn Guó purchases a small crumpled paper bag of fish pellets from a vendor at the gate. He scatters them like birdshot across the surface of the pond, watching the leveiathensque koi rise from the weedy green depths to recivce his offering. It is early Autumn. On his way out, he pauses beside a large puddle that occupies a sunken portion of the footpath and distinguishes this park from all the others in the city. He stands before it, hypnotised by the cascade of dead leaves as they tumble upwards towards a reflection of the branches that have banished them.