The First Rewind

It was the eighth day of his employment. A Wednesday. The temperature had broken at last; a typhoon two prefectures south had pulled the heat out of Qingyuan overnight, and the morning was grey and cool and felt like the first true breath of autumn. Lin Zhaoxu had walked to the office in a thin grey jacket that he had not worn since June.

He was at his desk by seven. He drank a cup of plain water. He read three policy briefs Lao Wei had set on his desk the night before, with the single instruction: *Read these. Don't take notes.* He read them twice. He understood, by the second reading, that they all touched on a single subject — a long-running proposal called the Western Industrial Park, on which the Municipal Government had been moving slowly toward a decision for almost two years.

He had heard the name *Western Industrial Park* mentioned three times in the last week. Once at the coordination meeting on his second day. Twice more in passing remarks between Lao Wei and the woman at the third desk, whose name was Section Member Ye and who, Lin had now established, was a quiet ally of Lao Wei and indifferent to everyone else.

He had not yet asked any direct question about it. A new clerk did not ask direct questions in his first week.

He read the briefs and put them back on Lao Wei's desk. Lao Wei nodded without looking up.

At nine the morning's small business began. At ten-thirty a draft document needed to be carried up to the third floor, to the office of Bureau Chief Liang of Land Resources. Zhao Yifan, who would normally have run such an errand, was not at his desk; he had gone out an hour earlier, citing — to no one in particular — a doctor's appointment. Lao Wei looked at Lin and tilted his head toward the door.

"You go. Don't get lost."

"Yes, Lao Wei."

The third floor was busier than the fourth. Land Resources was a larger bureau, and its corridor was always full of supplicants — small developers, township officials in for the day, men with rolled-up planning documents under their arms. Lin walked past them with the soft, deferential gait of a junior who did not yet know how to be looked at.

He found Bureau Chief Liang's office. He spoke to the secretary. He delivered the document. He turned to leave.

In the corridor outside, three men were talking in low voices. Lin recognized only one of them — Deputy Director Sun, of the Policy Research Section, a senior man whose name had been near the top of Lin's index cards. Sun was perhaps forty-six, of medium build, with the slightly rumpled look of a man who spent his working hours surrounded by more documents than he could reasonably read. He wore his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, where they sat like a second pair of eyes.

He glanced as Lin passed. He frowned slightly, as if trying to place him. Then he said, in a casual, almost bored voice:

"Ah — the new one. Lin Zhaoxu. The Yanjing graduate, isn't it?"

Lin stopped. He turned. He inclined his head. "Yes, Deputy Director."

"Mm. Pang's office. General clerk."

"Yes."

The two other men with Sun had gone silent and were watching with the particular alert disinterest that senior cadres used when their colleague decided, on a whim, to test a junior in front of them. Lin understood that he was now, for the next thirty seconds, the room.

"Tell me, then," Sun said, lowering his glasses onto his nose so that he could see Lin properly. "You're a smart young man. What's your view on the Western Industrial Park proposal?"

Lin's mind, which had been moving steadily and clearly all morning, went, for one full second, completely empty.

He had read the briefs. He had read them twice. He could have produced, in the privacy of his own room with a notebook and an evening, a thoughtful and balanced analysis of the proposal. But he had read the briefs only ninety minutes earlier, and the question had arrived in a corridor, before three senior men, with no warning, and the briefs had been technical, and his mouth was now slightly dry, and the second of empty mind stretched toward two.

He opened his mouth. He said, "Deputy Director —"

He stopped.

He had been about to say something. He did not know what. Some platitude about the proposal's importance to local development, perhaps. Some hedging phrase about *needing further study*. Whatever it was, he could feel — in the way a falling man feels the ground rushing up — that it was going to be a stupid thing.

Sun's mouth tightened. The two men with him exchanged the smallest of glances.

A new clerk who could not answer a senior cadre's question in a corridor was not unusual. A new clerk who could not answer it was simply a new clerk. He would be remembered, perhaps, for a few weeks, and then forgotten. There was no disaster here. There was only mild, casual disappointment. The kind that closed a small door without slamming it.

But Lin understood, with a sudden flat clarity that shocked him, that this small door — closed in this corridor by this man at ten thirty-seven on a Wednesday morning — would matter. Sun was a senior cadre. Senior cadres talked. They sat together at lunch and they mentioned, in passing, *that new boy Pang has, the one from Yanjing — oh, him? Don't expect much. I asked him a basic question last week and he stood there like a stone.*

A reputation, in Qingyuan officialdom, was a thing you carried for ten years. He had been carrying his — he had been carrying the *opportunity* of his — for eight days. And now, in the space of three seconds, in this corridor, he was about to break it.

He thought, very clearly, with a force that was almost a prayer: *I would give anything to take back the last sixty seconds.*

The world rolled.

It was not a dramatic sensation. It was not a spinning of the room or a flash of light or a sound. It was, he thought afterward, more like the feeling of a film reel running backward — the small mechanical reversal of a moment that had already happened. The air around him seemed to shiver, very faintly, at the edges of his vision. His heart, which had been beating fast, gave one strange double-beat.

And then —

He was three meters back down the corridor. He was walking. He had not yet passed Deputy Director Sun. The three men were standing in their group, talking in low voices, and Lin Zhaoxu was walking toward them with no document in his hand because he had already delivered it, and they had not yet looked up.

He did not stop walking. He did not slow his pace. His legs moved on their own; his face arranged itself, on its own, into the same soft deferential expression it had worn three meters back. Only his mind, behind his face, was screaming.

*The world has rewound.*

*I have rewound the world.*

He did not know how. He did not know why. He did not know, in the long slow second between one footstep and the next, whether he was hallucinating, whether he had had some kind of micro-stroke, whether he was about to wake up at his desk with Lao Wei looking at him strangely. He only knew, with the same flat clarity that had told him a moment earlier that the door was closing, that he had been given — somehow, through some impossible mechanism that his rational mind could not yet accept — a second pass at the next thirty seconds.

And that he had thirty seconds to use it.

He kept walking. He matched his pace exactly to what it had been the first time. He was three steps from the men.

Sun glanced up. He frowned slightly, as if trying to place him.

*I have done this before. I am doing it again.*

Sun said, casually: "Ah — the new one. Lin Zhaoxu. The Yanjing graduate, isn't it?"

Lin stopped. He inclined his head. "Yes, Deputy Director."

"Mm. Pang's office. General clerk."

"Yes."

Sun lowered his glasses. The two men beside him watched.

"Tell me, then," Sun said. "You're a smart young man. What's your view on the Western Industrial Park proposal?"

Lin had now had thirty seconds to think.

He had not, in those thirty seconds, conceived any brilliant new analysis of the proposal. He had not produced, from the unread depths of his memory, a hidden insight. The proposal had not changed. He had not changed.

But he had had thirty seconds to recognize what kind of question this was.

It was not a question that wanted an answer. It was a question that wanted a *display* — of judgment, of restraint, of the ability to recognize one's own limits. A new clerk who attempted to opine on a major policy proposal in a corridor on the eighth day of his career was a young man who did not understand the room. A new clerk who *declined to opine, gracefully* was a young man who already understood it.

The first time, a moment earlier, he had been about to produce an answer. That had been the mistake.

He bowed his head a fraction.

"Deputy Director, forgive me. I have only just begun to study the materials from the past quarter. I would not wish to express a half-formed view on a matter of such importance. May I prepare a written response by Friday?"

There was a small pause.

Sun's expression did not change. But his eyes did — a small softening at the corners that Lin would not have known to look for two weeks ago. He pushed his glasses back up onto his forehead.

"By Friday," he said. "Six pages. Don't pad it."

"Yes, Deputy Director."

"On my desk."

"Yes, Deputy Director."

Sun turned back to his colleagues. The conversation he had been having with them resumed, and Lin Zhaoxu was — already, in that precise second — no longer in the room.

He walked the rest of the corridor. He turned the corner. He found the staircase. He walked down two flights to the fourth floor. He went into the men's bathroom. He closed and locked the door of the single stall.

He sat down, fully clothed, on the closed lid of the toilet.

He pressed his palms against his eyes.

His head — he became aware of it slowly, as the adrenaline ebbed — was splitting. It was a migraine of a kind he had never had in his life, a hot bright spike behind his right eye, and a dull pressure across his forehead that throbbed with each heartbeat. He felt nauseated. He felt, for one strange moment, as if he had aged a year between one breath and the next.

He pressed his palms harder. He breathed.

*The world rewound.*

*Sixty seconds. Maybe less.*

*Only I remember.*

He thought back, as carefully as he could, to the precise instant of the rewind. He had been standing in front of Sun. He had been about to speak. He had thought: *I would give anything to take back the last sixty seconds.* And the world had rolled.

He tested it. He thought, deliberately, carefully, with the same intensity: *I would like to take back the last ten seconds.*

Nothing happened.

He thought it again. Nothing.

He sat for a long time in the locked stall, listening to the quiet hum of the bathroom fan. After a few minutes the migraine receded enough that he could open his eyes. The fluorescent light overhead was very harsh.

He took out his notebook. He turned to the back, to a page he had reserved for things he did not yet know how to file. He wrote, in characters smaller than any he had written in this notebook:

*Today, between 10:36 and 10:37, the world rewound by approximately one minute. Only I am aware of it. I had been about to make a serious mistake; the rewind allowed me to correct it. The trigger appeared to be a strong wish to take back the previous minute. The cost: severe headache. Subsequent attempts have not succeeded. Possible explanations: 1. hallucination. 2. micro-stroke. 3. something I do not yet have a name for.*

He paused. He held the pen above the paper.

He added one more line.

*Until I understand, I will tell no one.*

He closed the notebook.

He stood. He flushed the toilet, although he had not used it. He washed his hands. He looked at his face in the mirror. He looked tired but not visibly different. The migraine had settled into a dull pressure that he could function through. He straightened his collar. He walked out of the bathroom and back to the small office on the fourth floor.

Lao Wei did not look up as he came in.

"You took your time."

"I'm sorry, Lao Wei."

"Sit down."

He sat. He took out the policy briefs again, the ones on the Western Industrial Park, and he began to read them for a third time. This time he read them the way a man reads when he must, by Friday morning, produce a six-page written analysis for a senior cadre — a senior cadre who, in this version of the world, had not been disappointed in him, and who would now be looking for him to confirm or refute the small good impression he had made in a corridor.

The migraine throbbed on.

He read.

Once, around eleven-thirty, Section Member Ye glanced up from her own desk and looked at him — a long, considering glance, of the kind she had not directed at him before. Then she returned to her work.

Lao Wei did not look up at all.

But Lin felt — though he had no evidence for it — that Lao Wei had heard, somehow, in the rhythm of his footsteps when he came back into the office, that something had happened to him in the corridor that morning. Something that had made him a very slightly different man than the one who had carried the document upstairs an hour earlier.

He read.

He did not know what he had been given. He did not know whether the gift would come again, or whether it had been a single accident that he would never replicate. He did not know whether to be afraid of it or grateful for it or both.

He knew only one thing, which he already understood completely. Whatever it was — accident, gift, illness, miracle — he was not going to waste it.

He picked up his pen.

He began, on a clean page, to outline a six-page analysis of the Western Industrial Park proposal.

Outside, the cool grey morning had given way to a cool grey noon. The cicadas, broken by the typhoon, did not scream from the camphor trees today. The air through the small window was almost autumn.

He wrote.

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