Tales of the End of the Century

The change began with a toothbrush. Bai Ye stood in front of the warning mirror at the relay station, holding the toothbrush he had borrowed from Vasily. Not the toothbrush that had pierced Korsak's eye—the one Vasily had kept in the glove compartment of the jeep, wrapped in a red cloth like a sacred object. This was ordinary, with a blue plastic handle, the bristles worn and frayed, a spare toothbrush that Old Hu had rummaged through his travel bag, which he had somehow tucked there.

Bai Ye held his toothbrush up in front of the mirror. The person in the mirror also held their toothbrush, in sync, without delay. He switched the toothbrush to his left hand, and the person in the mirror switched theirs to their left hand as well. He brought the toothbrush to his mouth, and the person in the mirror brought theirs to their mouth as well. Then he stopped. Did he usually brush his teeth from the left or the right? He couldn't remember. Every morning, after squeezing out the toothpaste, his hand would automatically go into his mouth and brush back and forth, without him having to think about it. But now he did think about it. He stood in front of the mirror, toothbrush in mid-air, and suddenly he didn't know what to do next. Left or right? Such a simple choice, yet he couldn't remember.

He stood in front of the mirror for over a minute, finally putting down his toothbrush without brushing. Back in the hallway, Tie Niu was leaning a crowbar against the wall, peeling the paper filled with password changes from the previous night off the doorframe, folding it, and stuffing it into his jacket pocket. He paused when he saw Bai Ye.

Did you brush your teeth today?

"No," Bai Ye said.

Why?

"Because I don't remember whether I swiped from the left or the right first. It's not that I forgot, it's that I can't remember. It's like someone pulled a drawer out of my brain."

Tie Niu pulled his hand back from his pocket, picked up his toothbrush cup from beside the doorframe, and tapped it against the bottom to remove the dried toothpaste plaque. He glanced at Bai Ye, then put the toothbrush in his mouth and began brushing from the right. His movements were slow and large, each stroke like a demonstration. Bai Ye stood in the hallway watching Tie Niu brush his teeth. After about ten seconds, he turned back to the mirror, picked up his toothbrush, and began brushing from the left. Not because he remembered, but because Tie Niu started from the right, so he chose the left. It wasn't a habit, it was a choice—it was learning our habits, and if even our habits were chosen by ourselves, they had to be relearned.

Old Hu made breakfast. Noodles, soy sauce, minced garlic, the same recipe as before. But he added one thing—half a spoonful of chili sauce. Bai Ye looked down at the small patch of red oil in the bowl, slowly spreading and turning the soy sauce into an indescribable dark red.

"You never used to add chili peppers," he said.

Old Hu squatted on the doorstep, chewing on a steamed bun, and mumbled, "I never used to put sesame oil in my noodles. This spoonful of chili isn't for flavor; it's to let that thing know that I put the chili in this bowl of noodles myself."

Bai Ye ate the noodles. The chili peppers were so spicy that his eyes almost welled up with tears, but he finished them all, not leaving a single drop of broth. After finishing, he placed the bowl on the windowsill and made a note in his small notebook: "Today's chili peppers, the first bite was garlic."

The man in gray and Vasily sat under the jujube tree, a piece of paper spread on their laps. Each of them held a pencil and was drawing something on the paper. Bai Ye walked over and saw a crooked human figure drawn on the paper. A spiral was drawn on the top of the figure's head, each stroke very slowly, like someone repeatedly tracing the same pattern on glass with their finger.

"Did you draw this?" Bai Ye asked.

“We drew it together,” the man in gray said. He put down the pencil, loosened his fingers, then picked up the pencil again, switching it to his left hand. He closed his eyes and slowly wrote a line of Russian in the upper right corner of the paper, the handwriting stiff yet exceptionally clear—“Korsak didn’t die yesterday. He stood behind me and wrote this in the handwriting I’d just learned.” After finishing, he pushed the paper to Vasily. Vasily took it and added a line to the paper with his right hand—“Then he laughed. Not Korsak’s laugh, but my own.” He put down the pencil, and the two looked at each other, like two roommates who had just woken from the same dream checking that the room keys were still in their pockets.

Bai Ye bent down, picked up the pen that had fallen to his feet, and twirled it in his palm. He opened his little notebook and added two words under "chili pepper" that he had written down that morning—"left".

In the afternoon, Tie Niu began practicing throwing the axe with his left hand. He first drew a small circle on the trunk of a jujube tree with chalk, just big enough to fit the axe blade. Then he stood at the other end of the yard, holding the axe in his right hand, aimed for about two seconds, and threw. The axe embedded itself in the trunk, hitting the center of the chalk circle. He pulled the axe out, switched to his left hand, aimed for at least ten seconds, and threw again. The axe hit the trunk, bounced, rolled a few times on the ground, and came to a stop. He went over, picked up the axe, switched back to his right hand, and threw again. Then he switched to his left hand. He repeated this more than ten times, but his left hand still couldn't hit the target.

But he meticulously recorded the trajectory of each left-hand axe throw—the angle of his elbow, the timing of his fingertips releasing their grip, the speed at which the axe tumbled in the air. From completely missing the target, to grazing it, to embedding it in the bark but failing to hold. Bai Ye sat on the doorstep watching, recalling how he had stood in front of the mirror for over a minute yesterday morning, toothbrush in mid-air, unsure which side to brush from. Tie Niu had already practiced to the point where his left hand could embed itself in tree bark.

Lan Susu's assignment was to relearn how to write. Not to learn anything new, but to correct her old handwriting. She rewrote Sergei's notes paragraph by paragraph in her notebook, translated them into Chinese, and then copied them onto a stack of new index cards with a fountain pen. Finally, she neatly arranged the original manuscript and the cards into different folders. She did all this using a pen grip she had never used before: her right hand held the pen with four fingers, her thumb pressing against the back of her index finger, the pen tilted back, and her wrist suspended in the air. Previously, she was only used to holding the pen with her thumb and index finger. Now she alternated between the two grips, using the old grip in the morning and the new grip in the afternoon, never repeating the pattern from the previous day.

“Sergei said that thing learns from the past.” She spoke as she copied, the pen scratching against the paper. “It can’t learn who you’re becoming because it can only copy actions you’ve already done. It doesn’t create. It doesn’t have imagination. It doesn’t have a ‘next.’”

Old Hu picked up the enamel mug, took a sip, swallowed slowly with a mouthful of water, then cleared his throat and said, "That's why it can't learn to be like a chili pepper." He put the mug on the windowsill, stood up, and walked to the jujube tree to discuss with Tie Niu about adding a new mark to the tree. Next to the axe nail mark, a crooked vertical line was added with chalk.

At night, Bai Ye sat under the jujube tree writing the last entry in his daily journal. He had a pencil, a small notebook, and since the moonlight wasn't enough, he borrowed a kerosene lamp from inside. He wrote down all the habits he had changed that day: brushing his teeth with his left hand in the morning, starting from the left side; drinking soup before eating noodles at breakfast; taking longer steps than usual when walking from the courtyard gate to the jujube tree; and deliberately slowing down his speech when talking to Tie Niu, making each sentence longer than usual.

He put down his pen. The beam of a flashlight moved from the other end of the corridor, and Lan Susu walked to his side, handing him a piece of paper. It was the last page of Sergei's notes that she had copied that day. The handwriting was steadyer than before, and the new pen grip showed no signs of rust.

“‘It can’t learn to be the person you’re becoming.’” Bai Ye read aloud. He folded the paper and put it in his inner pocket. “What if I don’t know what kind of person I want to become?”

Lan Susu was silent for a moment, then looked up at the branches of the jujube tree under the moonlight. "Then you should first become someone you don't know. It can't learn anything uncertain. What it fears is uncertainty."

Bai Ye turned off the flashlight, and the yard darkened. The flame of the kerosene lamp flickered gently inside the glass shade, and the shadow of the jujube tree swayed a few times on the courtyard wall before settling down. He read the English sentence over and over twice, and finally gently turned the flashlight back on.

"So we have to keep changing," he said, "not just to keep it from catching up, but to be faster than it."

"Just a thought faster is enough." Lan Susu stood up, dusted off her trousers, and walked towards the east wing. She stopped at the door without turning back. "You've changed all day. The way you brush your teeth, the speed at which you walk, the speed at which you talk. Have you noticed that you haven't looked at your own hands even once?"

Bai Ye lowered his head. His right hand rested on his knee, palm down. The scab on his palm had hardened, its edges curling up. He hadn't looked at his hands today. Not because he'd forgotten, but because he no longer needed to. He lifted his right hand from his knee, put it in his pocket, and felt for the small round mirror. On the tin back, the outline of a bird pressed against his fingertips. He took the mirror out and turned it right side out. In the moonlight, a crack sliced ​​his face in two. He glanced at it, then turned the mirror over, back side up, and put it back in his pocket.

The next morning, when Bai Ye got up to brush his teeth, he realized he couldn't remember which side he had started brushing from the day before. Standing in front of the mirror, toothbrush in mid-air—left or right? He couldn't remember. But he didn't stop thinking; he switched the toothbrush to his left hand and started brushing from the middle. Whether it was left or right yesterday, today it was the middle. Tomorrow it might be right, the day after tomorrow it might be left, and the day after that it might still be the middle. He himself didn't know. Neither did it.

Tie Niu was practicing throwing an axe with his left hand in the yard. Yesterday, his left hand could only drive the axe into the bark, but today he could hang the axe for three seconds without it falling. Bai Ye sat on the threshold watching, holding an enamel mug with a small piece of chili oil floating on the surface. He also noted this down in his notebook—"Tie Niu can hang an axe with his left hand for three seconds."

In the morning, the man in gray and Vasily began cleaning the last filing cabinet in the relay station. The cabinet door was rusted shut, so Tie Niu pried it open with a crowbar. Inside, there were only a few pages of water-soaked printing paper and a dead rat. The man in gray spread the wet paper out to dry on the windowsill, while Vasily wrapped the dead rat in plastic and buried it under the birch tree by the dirt road outside the yard. After burying it, the two stood together in front of the jujube tree for a while, then suddenly each stretched out their left hand, making the same triangle in the air, and then laughed. Not simultaneously; Vasily laughed first, and the man in gray followed a beat later.

That evening, Bai Ye sat on the doorstep writing in his diary. Today's entries were long: Tie Niu's left hand holding the axe for three seconds, the gray-clad man and Vasily's left triangle, Lao Hu's new spoonful of fermented bean paste at dinner, and Lan Susu's change in handwriting. He wrote all of this down, pausing at the bottom of the last page, and then added a line at the foot of the page.

Lan Susu came out and sat down beside him. She didn't speak, but simply watched the jujube tree with him for a while. The sparrow on the jujube branch came again, hopped a few times on the branch, tilted its head to look at them, and flew away.

"What are you writing?" she asked.

Bai Ye closed the notebook and placed it on her lap. The flame of the kerosene lamp flickered inside the glass shade, then settled.

"Change," he said. "I'm writing about change."