The Researcher

He spent three nights in the library.

He went on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of the week following the audience with the Mayor — after work, between six-thirty and ten, when the third floor was largely empty and the duty librarian was a thin elderly man who had, in the past three months, come to recognize Lin and to leave him to his reading without disturbance.

He went because he had decided that — before drafting the smooth-surface brief Pang expected — he would re-read every land-use document in the library's holdings that touched on the Western quadrant. He would do this not to surface anything in the brief, but to — understand, more thoroughly than the brief required, what the actual situation on the ground was.

He went, in part, because the Mayor's instruction had been clear. He would produce a smooth-surface brief. The smooth-surface brief did not require him to know any more than the master plan disclosed.

But he went also because — having now been spoken to by the Mayor, having now been told that in three years his name would be on lists, he had decided that — he wanted to know things. He wanted to know what was actually true, on the ground, in the western quadrant of his city, regardless of what the brief would say.

He wanted, in some sense, to be — the kind of clerk who knew things.

Knowing was — not the same as acting on what one knew.

#

Su Wanyin did not — for the entirety of the three evenings — ask him what he was reading.

She was at her own desk on the third floor each evening. She did her own work. She nodded at him when he arrived. She brought him, once each evening, a cup of plain hot water from the staff alcove. She did not — once — look at his stack of documents.

On the third evening — Thursday — at a quarter to ten, she stopped at his table on her way out.

She said: "You will be at the Eastern Hall on Sunday."

"Yes."

"You will tell me, then, what you are reading."

"I —"

"You will tell me, Lin Zhaoxu, the part you can tell. The rest you will keep. I will not ask for the rest."

He looked at her.

He said: "Yes."

She nodded.

She left.

#

He spent those three evenings learning the western quadrant.

He read the 1998 western land-use survey for the third time in five months. This time he read it — not for its policy implications but for its texture. He read its descriptions of the small villages within the boundaries — three villages, each with populations in the low hundreds at the time of the survey, each with brief notes on their agricultural practices, their water sources, their elder demographics. He read the 1996 environmental study that the survey referenced — a thick volume of geological and hydrological assessments that he had not previously read.

He read the 1996 environmental study slowly. He took notes, in a small private notebook he had purchased for the purpose, on the specific concerns the study raised about the seventh reservation zone — the one adjacent to the consolidated sub-zone in the new master plan. The seventh zone contained, the study indicated, a shallow groundwater aquifer that supplied — at the time of the study — approximately eighteen hundred residents in the surrounding villages and townships. The aquifer was — fragile. It had a slow recharge rate. Industrial development upstream of it could — by the study's models — contaminate it within five to seven years.

He read the supplementary materials. He read the 2001 follow-up study, which had revised the aquifer estimates slightly downward but had maintained the contamination concerns. He read the 2008 update, which had noted that the population dependent on the aquifer had grown to approximately twenty-two hundred residents.

He read, in the earliest available editions of the city statistical yearbooks, the demographic information on the three villages within the relevant boundaries. He noted, in his small private notebook, that one of the villages — a small place called Beishan, population three hundred and seventy-four at the most recent census — had been documented in the 1998 survey as having a particular concentration of elderly residents. The village's demographic profile had — over the subsequent twenty years — aged further; the most recent yearbook listed Beishan's population as two hundred and ninety-one, with the average age recorded as fifty-eight.

He thought, looking at this information: *These are real people. These are three villages of real people, living over a fragile aquifer that supplies their water, and the new master plan would place an industrial development upstream of them, which by the 1996 hydrological models would contaminate their water within seven years.*

He thought: *The smooth-surface brief I will draft for Pang will not — mention the villages. The smooth-surface brief will not mention the aquifer. The smooth-surface brief will not mention that there are, in these villages, two hundred and ninety-one elderly residents in Beishan and similar populations in the other two, who will — by mathematical certainty if the master plan proceeds without reconciliation — find their water contaminated within seven years of the industrial sub-zone's construction.*

He thought: *The Mayor has told me that the points will be — addressed, through other channels, in approximately two weeks. The addressing will produce a procedural delay. The plan will be revised. The revisions will, presumably, include — reconciliation with the 1998 reservation clauses, which would protect the seventh zone, which would protect the aquifer, which would protect the villages.*

He thought: *Or — the revisions will not. The revisions may — be cosmetic. The revisions may simply — paper over the procedural objections without actually changing the substantive plan. The plan may, in May, proceed in a slightly different form that — by means I cannot now anticipate — works around the 1998 clauses without honoring them. The villages may, over the next seven years, lose their water.*

He thought: *I do not know which.*

He thought: *I have — by my new connection to the Mayor's apparatus — agreed to trust the Mayor's process. I have — by my role as a junior clerk — accepted that the matter is not within my hands. The smooth-surface brief I will draft is — Pang's brief, for Pang's purposes, within Pang's office, on Pang's deadline. The 1998 clauses are not — my responsibility.*

He thought, with a small interior chill: *And yet — the villages exist. The aquifer exists. The two hundred and ninety-one elderly residents of Beishan exist. They will, depending on what happens in the next two months in rooms I am not in, either continue to drink water from their aquifer for the rest of their lives, or — not.*

He thought: *I am being asked, by my own choices and the choices of others, to — trust that the rooms I am not in will produce the right outcome.*

He thought: *I do not — yet — know whether I trust them.*

#

On Thursday night at ten — when the duty librarian came around to indicate that the third floor would close in twenty minutes — Lin closed his books.

He sat at the table for a moment with his hands folded.

Then he stood. He returned the volumes to the shelves himself, in the careful order Su Wanyin had taught him in October. He nodded to the duty librarian. He walked down the stairs.

Su Wanyin was — gone. She had left at ten. She did not, in the lobby, leave him any note.

He walked out into the cold March night.

He walked the long way home — across the bridge, along the river, through the old quarter. He stopped at a small temple in the old quarter that he had not previously visited. The temple was closed. He stood at the gate for perhaps three minutes, looking at the small lantern that burned at the gate-house.

He thought: *I am — twenty-two. I have been in this city for seven months. I have, in those seven months, learned — what I have learned. I have, in the past forty-eight hours, been recruited by the Mayor and — by my own choice — accepted the recruitment. I have, in three nights of reading, discovered — the existence of two hundred and ninety-one elderly residents of a small village whose water depends on a decision I am not party to.*

He thought: *The two facts — the recruitment and the village — are connected. They are connected in the sense that — the Mayor's recruitment of me has placed me adjacent to decisions that affect the village. They are connected in the sense that — being adjacent to such decisions is, going forward, what my life will be. Most of the decisions I am adjacent to will have — corresponding villages.*

He thought: *I will not, in most of these cases, be able to — know what the villages are. I will be too busy with the smooth-surface briefs and the procedural maneuvers and the accumulating files. I will — for years — produce documents that affect, in their cumulative impact, the lives of villages I have not visited and elderly residents I have not met.*

He thought: *Tonight I have — by my own deliberate effort — known one. Two hundred and ninety-one residents in Beishan. The knowing has not changed my course. I will produce the smooth-surface brief tomorrow. The brief will not mention them. They will be — invisible in the brief.*

He thought: *They will not, however, be invisible to me.*

He thought, slowly: *That is — perhaps — what the work will be. To — know — even when I cannot — act. To carry the knowing as — its own kind of weight. To produce the smooth-surface briefs while — internally — keeping account of what the briefs do not say.*

He thought: *Lao Wei has been doing this for thirty-eight years. Liu Aijun for twenty-four. Old Su for forty-five. They have — each — carried thousands of villages in their heads.*

He thought: *I will carry — perhaps — a small fraction of what they carry. By the time I am Lao Wei's age, I will — have a head full of villages.*

He thought: *That is — what the work weighs. It is not — paper. It is — villages.*

He walked home.

That night he did not write in his daily-record notebook.

He read three poems by Su Shi very slowly. Then he took out his small private notebook — the one in which he had been writing his three nights of village notes — and on the inside cover, before any of the notes, he wrote a single character.

护.

*Protect. Watch over. Guard.*

He did not — quite — explain the character to himself.

He closed the notebook.

He went to bed.

He slept poorly. In his sleep he dreamed, for the first time in months, of his grandfather's village in Qingyuan County — of the small classroom where his grandfather had taught for forty-three years, of the worn wooden desks, of the smell of chalk and pine ink, of the children's voices reciting characters in the rhythmic singsong of village schools. The dream did not — contain — his grandfather. The classroom was empty. The chalk was white at the base of the blackboard. The desks were empty. Outside the small window, the village was quiet.

He woke at five.

He rose. He boiled water. He made tea.

He went to work.

The day began.

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