The Map

It was a Sunday in late October.

The morning was cold. Frost had come in the night for the first time that autumn — a thin white skin on the rooftops of the alley, gone by ten as the sun rose over the back wall of the noodle shop, but cold enough at first light that Lin Zhaoxu had taken his thicker coat from the wardrobe before going out for breakfast. The cold was a small clear pleasure. He had grown up in Qingyuan County, three hundred kilometers north, and his body recognized the first frost the way a man recognizes a familiar voice.

He bought two steamed buns and a small bowl of soy milk at the cart on the corner. He ate them standing up, the steam rising into the cold air. He walked the long way back to the boarding house, past the river, past the small park where he had tested the rewind on his second day, past a row of plane trees whose leaves had just started turning. He climbed the stairs to his room.

He locked the door behind him.

He sat at the small desk. He took out, from the false bottom of the drawer, the larger record-of-the-day notebook. From between its pages he took out the folded paper map of Qingyuan officialdom that he had drawn six weeks ago, on his second weekend in the city.

He spread it on the desk.

He looked at it for a long time.

It was a primitive thing, the map — drawn on a single sheet of butcher paper from the noodle shop downstairs, with the smell of pork fat still faintly in the paper. The names were in his small careful hand. The connections were thin lines of black ink. The marks of allegiance and enmity were tiny — a red dot beside Director Pang's name; a black dot beside Lao Wei's; a small question mark beside Zhao Yifan's; a scatter of small unmarked names along the edges, men he had logged but not yet placed.

It was no longer adequate.

In six weeks he had learned, by direct observation, more about the men of Qingyuan officialdom than the map showed. He had learned which of them bowed slightly more deeply to which others in the corridor. He had learned which secretaries took messages for which bureau chiefs — the secretarial network being, as Lao Wei had once said in passing, *the second nervous system of the building.* He had learned which of them attended which weekend banquets, and which of those banquets had been hosted at which restaurants by which patrons. He had learned, most recently, the existence of a person named Old Cao — a province-level patron of the Zhao family — and the existence, more troublingly, of Zhao Yifei.

The map was a six-week-old map. The world it described had moved.

He folded it. He set it aside. He took a fresh sheet of butcher paper from beneath his bed — he had bought a small roll of it at a stationery shop two weeks ago, in anticipation of this morning — and he spread it on the desk, and he weighted its corners with the teacup, the inkstone, the brush case, and a small smooth stone he had picked up in the courtyard of the library three weeks ago and had kept on his desk ever since. He uncapped a pen.

He began.

He began at the top with the two names he had begun with the first time. *Mayor Cao Yongzheng. Party Secretary Han Yuting.* He drew a horizontal line connecting them; he marked it with a small jagged stroke at its midpoint, the sign of a fault. The two men who ruled Qingyuan ruled it together because they had to, and against each other because they wished to. The fault was the central fact of the city.

Below them he drew the bureau chiefs.

He drew them more carefully than he had the first time. Where, in the first map, he had grouped them roughly into *Cao's men* and *Han's men*, he now drew finer distinctions. Some bureau chiefs were more Cao's than others. Some leaned to Han only on certain issues — usually, he had observed, issues touching their own bureaus' budgets — and were otherwise neutral. Some were neutral on all issues except one, on which they had committed long ago and could not retreat. He drew dotted lines for the conditional allegiances and solid lines for the firm ones.

Below the bureau chiefs he drew the directors.

Director Pang appeared, this time, with two lines: a solid line up to Mayor Cao, and a thin dotted line — slightly wavering, drawn with deliberate uncertainty — up to Party Secretary Han. Pang was Cao's man; Pang also wished to be available to Han if Cao should ever fall. The dotted line was not reciprocated. Han, he had observed, did not yet trust Pang.

He drew Director Tian, of the Policy Research Section. He drew Director Liu, of the Secretariat Section. He drew Bureau Chief Liang, of Land Resources, with a heavier line up to Cao than the first map had shown — Cao had visited Liang's office twice in the past month, and the meaning of those visits had become, in retrospect, clearer than Lin had recognized at the time.

He drew Deputy Director Sun.

Sun had not been on the first map. Sun was, in the first map, only one name among the senior cadres, undifferentiated. He drew Sun now with a single small box of his own, beneath Director Tian, with no line up — no committed allegiance — and three thin lines outward, to other senior cadres in other bureaus, with whom Sun was apparently friendly without being aligned. The three lines marked Sun as a *floating* man — a man who had decided, perhaps long ago, that his security came from being trusted by everyone above him without being owned by anyone.

He paused, the pen above the paper.

This had been Lao Wei's category in the first map, more or less. He had drawn Lao Wei, six weeks ago, as a man without firm vertical lines. He had drawn him as alone.

He looked at the new map. He looked at Lao Wei's name in its old position.

He understood, suddenly, that the first map had been wrong.

It had been wrong not in its facts but in its premise. He had drawn the first map as a hierarchy — bosses on top, subordinates below, vertical lines of authority running up and down. He had drawn Lao Wei as alone in a hierarchy, and had thought of him as therefore weak.

But Lao Wei was not weak.

Lao Wei was thirty-one years in the building. Lao Wei knew where every body was buried. Lao Wei did not give advice — and yet, by the simple act of telling stories on a rainy evening, had reshaped the career-arc of a young clerk who had been about to make a serious mistake. Lao Wei had given a packet of Tieguanyin twice now, had given a cup of dark roast oolong after a baijiu lunch, and had, on the day the memo went to Pang, looked up at no one and said *it's a good day to leave the office on time.*

Lao Wei was not alone in the hierarchy. Lao Wei was *not in the hierarchy at all.*

Lao Wei was in a different network.

Lin set down the pen. He stood. He walked to the small window and looked out at the courtyard below, where the morning sunlight was now bright and a woman was beating a quilt against a railing. The dust motes danced.

He thought.

He thought for perhaps ten minutes.

Then he sat down again, and he picked up the pen, and on a separate part of the paper — to the side of the main hierarchy, in its own small corner — he began to draw a different network.

He drew Lao Wei. He drew, beside him, Section Member Ye. He drew, in a tiny tentative pencil mark — because he was not yet sure — Section Chief Li Mingxia, the woman with the sharp eyes who had appeared at the Zhao banquet at the lower foot of the table. He drew Hu Erming, the quiet old clerk in their office, with whom he had now exchanged perhaps fifteen words in five weeks but whose tea preferences he had logged and whose nod-of-greeting in the corridor had a particular reserved weight.

He drew thin lines connecting them.

The lines were not vertical. They did not run up to the bureau chiefs or down to the junior clerks. They ran horizontally, between the names, and they were dotted — not because the relationships were weak, but because they were *quiet*. The relationships in this network would not be visible to a man who looked only at hierarchy. They would be visible only to a man who watched, as Lin had watched for five weeks, the small unspoken acts of the office: who covered for whom, who failed to notice what the others failed to notice, who quietly returned the right document to the right desk five minutes before its owner remembered they had needed it.

He looked at this small network, in its corner of the page.

He understood that this was not, in fact, a faction of its own. It was something both smaller and larger than a faction. It was the *substrate* of the office — the layer of mid-level people who, having decided long ago that they would not be the heroes of any story, had also decided that they would not be the villains. They were the people who made the office work despite the men who ran it.

They were not powerful. They could not promote anyone. They could not block a promotion that the men above them had already decided on.

But they could, by inches and by silences, make the difference between a young clerk who was given the right document on the right Saturday afternoon and a young clerk who was sent for the wrong errand at the wrong moment. They could make the difference, over a year, between a clerk who survived his first year and a clerk who did not.

He drew, very slowly, a single thin dotted line from his own position — *Lin Zhaoxu, Section Member, General Office* — to the small network in the corner.

The line was tentative. He had not yet earned a place in that network. He had only been noticed by it.

But it was the right direction.

He looked at the map.

He drew, finally, the harder lines.

He drew a small red mark — heavier than the one on the first map — beside Director Pang's name. He drew a smaller red mark beside Zhao Yifan's. He drew a thin red dotted line connecting Zhao Yifan up to Zhao Hongdao at the provincial level, a connection he had not had on the first map at all. He drew Zhao Hongdao as a small box outside the boundary of the main map — a province-level shadow that fell across the city.

He drew, beside Zhao Hongdao, in the smallest possible characters, *Old Cao, prov. patron, ?faction.* Old Cao was a question. He had not yet been able to place Old Cao within any provincial faction. Old Cao might be Zhao Hongdao's friend, or Old Cao might be Zhao Hongdao's owner. The two were different in important ways. He did not know which yet.

He drew a small mark beside Zhao Yifei's name and left it unfilled. Zhao Yifei was the unknown of the lunch. She had watched him for the entire meal. She had not spoken to him directly. He did not know whether the report she had made — and he was now certain she had made one, to her father, that same evening — had been favorable or unfavorable.

He drew, finally, the last line.

He drew it slowly, with the pen, because he had thought about it on and off for two weeks now and had decided this morning to draw it.

He drew a single thin pencil line — pencil, not ink, because pencil could be erased — from his own position, as Section Member, to the corner of the page.

In that corner he wrote, in characters as small as he could make them:

*Su.*

Just the surname. Not the given name.

He looked at it.

He did not erase it.

But he did not strengthen it into ink either. He left it in pencil.

Then he folded the new map. He put it inside the larger record-of-the-day notebook. He put the notebook in the false bottom of the drawer. He took the old map, the six-week-old butcher paper, and he tore it carefully into eight pieces, and he put the pieces into a small metal bowl on the desk, and he struck a match and burned them.

The smoke smelled of pork fat and old ink.

He waited until the ashes were cool. He took the bowl down to the courtyard and emptied it into the dustbin by the gate.

He came back upstairs.

He sat at the desk. He drank a cup of cold tea. He thought.

He had been in Qingyuan for forty-three days. He had been a section member for six weeks. He had survived his first month. He had not made any catastrophic mistakes. He had been seen by two senior cadres for the right reasons; he had been noticed, dangerously, by one provincial-level family for reasons not yet entirely clear. He had been adopted, in a small quiet way, by a man who did not give advice. He had — and he allowed himself, this Sunday morning, to think the thought that he had not yet allowed himself fully to think — met one woman whose face, when he closed his eyes, came to him without any particular effort.

He had a notebook he kept in his jacket lining.

He had a strange small power that, four times now, had let him take back a minute of his life, and a fifth time, on the previous Tuesday, had failed to come — had resisted his summoning, for reasons he did not yet understand, on a day when the headache had been already present from the morning and he had tried to use the rewind for a small face-saving correction at lunch. He had added that data point to his record. He had added the corollary: *the system may have something like a refractory period beyond the one-day rule. Or my own state may matter. Further observation required.*

He had — he understood, sitting in the cold sunlight of his small room on this October Sunday — survived the first beginning.

Now the second beginning would start.

The second beginning would not be about whether he could pour tea correctly, or whether he could write a memo that would impress a senior cadre, or whether he could refuse a third cup of baijiu without giving offense. He had learned those things. He would never not know them again. The second beginning would be about the question — the deeper question, the one Lao Wei's two stories had circled without naming — of whether the man between him and the next rung was the right kind of man to speak his name correctly when the right person asked.

Director Pang would not be that man. Pang had said *I will find a way to use you,* which was the language of the first kind of director, the kind in Lao Wei's first story. Pang would not say his name. Pang would eat his name and choke on it later.

Sun might be that man. Sun had kept the sealed copy. Sun had not spoken his name to Pang, but Sun had quietly preserved the option of speaking it to someone else, somewhere else, at the time of Sun's choosing.

Lao Wei would never speak his name. Lao Wei did not give advice and did not make recommendations. But Lao Wei, by the simple act of being Lao Wei, had taught him how to recognize a man who would, when the time came.

The work of the second beginning was to find that man.

He capped the pen.

He stood.

Outside, the woman beating the quilt had finished and gone inside. The courtyard was silent in the bright cold sunlight. The sparrows that lived in the eaves of the noodle shop had come down and were picking at something on the ground.

He took down the brush case from the shelf. He ground a small amount of ink. He took a fresh sheet of newsprint. He weighted the corners.

He held the brush above the paper for a moment, his wrist loose.

He wrote one character.

It was 见.

*See.*

He looked at it for a long time.

He weighted it to the desk with the teacup.

He went down the stairs and out into the cold sunlight and bought a bowl of dumplings at a small shop near the river and ate them slowly. He watched the river. He thought of nothing in particular. The water was very dark and very calm.

He had been in Qingyuan for forty-three days.

He thought, for a moment, of the man he had been on the morning he had stepped off the train. The boy in the ironed blue shirt, with the polished cheap shoes and the satchel and the calligraphy brush.

He missed that boy a little.

But he understood, also, that the boy had served his purpose. The boy had walked into the marble lobby and had stood across the street for two minutes before going in. The boy had counted the cups. The boy had survived the first day, and the second, and the eighth, and the forty-third.

The boy had made the new map possible.

He let the river go on.

He stood. He walked back to the boarding house. He climbed the stairs to his small room. He let himself in, and he sat at the desk, and he opened the larger notebook, and he turned to a fresh page, and at the top of it he wrote, in his small careful hand:

*Day 43. The map is redrawn. The second beginning starts tomorrow.*

He underlined it once.

He closed the notebook.

Outside, the cold sunlight moved across the courtyard, and the day went on, and the sparrows fed, and somewhere in another part of the city a woman in a navy ribbon was, perhaps, returning a thin black folder to the wrong shelf in the third row of the second stack room of the Municipal Library, and noting it down in her register, and going back to her desk to read.

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