The week between the tuition-paid Saturday and this Saturday ran at its own pace.
The Tuesday seminar ran. The Wednesday Mu lab ran. Bai Yueran did not, at the Wednesday lab gate, hand me a folded paper. She would not, by the disengagement timeline, need to — not until the Article 14 window opened. The Friday morning shift ran quiet. Manager Fang's three items this Friday: one, the Beijing-pipeline winter-recess-after week was closing at the Sister-Lin-Sat-Jan-31 knock; two, the suit-gentleman remained at the Article-14-administrative-pre-positioning desk through the February 18 hearing; three, Father had called the shop telephone Thursday at 5:42 PM with Doctor Yan's Tuesday January 20 report: third-dose-lift recommended, from the late-November-mid-tier to the late-January-upper-mid-tier, formalized at the Saturday January 24 follow-up. Father had, by Mother's relayed message, already decided. He would take the new tablet at the Saturday morning kitchen-table dose-administration, before the meal.
I had written the tenth ledger entry in the Suzhou-cotton-paper notebook: *Jan 22, 2015 — 5:42 PM IRL — Manager Fang (relay from Father) — three minutes — Doctor Yan, third-dose-lift to late-January-upper-mid-tier, formalized Sat Jan 24 follow-up.*
The tenth. I had not, in the first timeline, kept a ledger. In that timeline there had been nothing to track — or rather, I had not yet understood that tracking was what you did when you were trying to not lose something. You kept the ledger when you finally understood what losing cost.
I closed the notebook and set it back at the edge of the desk. On the walk back from the café I had passed the bus stop on the main road and stood there for a minute in the cold, watching the No. 11 go past without getting on. It was habit. In the first timeline I had taken that bus home from the part-time shift for three years without ever noting which line it was or how many stops it made. This time I noted things. Eleven stops from the café to the eastern gate of HZUT. Two minutes standing time at stops two and six where the lights at the crossing were long. The small habits of a life I was tracking more carefully than I had ever tracked anything before.
***
The 9:40 to Suzhou was almost empty.
Wanqing took the window seat. Mother Plum's mooncake cone at her right hand. She didn't say much on the way out. She knew what the morning's first item was, and she was the kind of person who let a thing breathe before it happened rather than talking around it.
I ate one of the mooncakes somewhere after Wuxi. It tasted of red bean and the particular sugar that Mother Plum used in the winter batches, heavier than the autumn ones. I ate it slowly. Outside the window the flat land of the Taihu basin went past in the grey January light — fields, canal cuts, the backs of villages, a water tower or two. The same landscape on the same line every Saturday. I had stopped trying to find something new in it. The constancy was the point. You show up on the same train, the same landscape holds still, and whatever you're going to do at the other end is already going to happen by the time you step on the platform.
We came into Suzhou north at 11:48.
We took the No. 4 bus. We walked Pingjiang Road. The cobbles were dry this Saturday, the cold more settled than the week before, the kind of winter cold that commits. Auntie Wu at the chestnut brazier did not, this Saturday morning, look up. Last week had been the tuition-paid Saturday; this week was the Saturday after. The not-looking was its own form of acknowledgment — the lane had a protocol for the morning after a milestone, and the protocol was a respectful silence. She handed us, at the three-meter mark without eye contact, four small paper cones.
Four, not five. Mother had sent Xiaoyu to the Pingjiang Road auntie-network's study group at the Number Eight Lane teacher's flat — the second-cycle study group for fourteen-year-olds whose mothers knew that a dose-lift Saturday was not a Saturday for children to navigate. Four cups at the table. One for each of the adults.
We turned at the third doorway on the left.
Mother was at the kitchen window. She said: "Wanqing. Cangtian. Come in. Wash."
***
In the front room Father was at the head chair in the same clean grey sweater. The mahogany table was set for four. At Father's place setting, at the east edge, was the new-dose tablet in its blister-pack render — the late-January-upper-mid-tier dose Doctor Yan had recommended at the Tuesday weekly. The blister pack was unopened. Father had not opened it yet. He had been sitting with it there, at the east edge of the table, waiting.
Mother brought the pot of Auntie Wu's mother's late-November oolong. She set it at the center. She poured four cups, one at each cardinal point of the table. The steam rose in the cold air of the front room. No one moved for a moment.
Father picked up the tablet.
He held it for three seconds. I counted.
He said, in the low even voice he had not used at the kitchen table since the late spring of the surgery's first-dose-administration: "Doctor Yan said — at the Tuesday weekly — that by the late-spring weekly the projection may, by the upper-mid-tier dose's blood-marker pace, be at the five-month-flat."
He paused.
"The five-month-flat is — by my own 2014 spring-surgery's initial reading — the pre-2017 reading I had not, in 2014, expected to reach."
The room was quiet. Outside, somewhere on the lane, a bicycle went past on the cobbles.
He said: "I am, at this Saturday morning, taking the new-dose tablet."
Mother held his hand at his weak left elbow. Not guiding him — just holding. He didn't need guidance to swallow a tablet. She held his hand because it was Saturday and the tablet was real and they were both sitting in a front room in Pingjiang Road in January of 2015, which was further than his 2014 projection had thought they'd be.
He swallowed the tablet with the first sip of the oolong.
He set the empty cup at the east edge where the blister pack had been.
The room was the same as it always was: the mahogany table, the four good bowls, the smell of the clay pot coming from the kitchen. But something in the air had shifted, in the small way things shift when something difficult has just been done quietly and without ceremony. None of us named it. We held it instead, the four of us, for the three seconds it took for the moment to settle into the room and become ordinary.
He said: "Eat."
***
Mother brought the Saturday meal of the first Saturday of the third-dose-lift: pork ribs in the brown clay pot, cold sliced pork with garlic sauce, garlic chives, cold cucumber, the Wu-auntie pickled radish, the Auntie-Wu-mother-recipe sweet osmanthus rice that the tuition-paid Saturday had been the first occasion of. She had made it again without comment, as if it were now a regular dish and not one she'd held in reserve for years.
The meal lasted forty-six minutes.
When it was over Wanqing stood and started to clear. Mother said: "Sit down. Cangtian will clear."
I cleared.
By the third load Father had moved from the head chair to the western front-room window chair, Mother's hand at his elbow through the crossing. He sat. He picked up the Suzhou paper.
In the kitchen Mother said, at the counter, not turning from what she was doing: "Cangtian. Tell Wanqing's mother — when you are at her kitchen on the Saturday two weeks from now, after the soybean-milk-recipe-pancakes Saturday here — that the late-January-upper-mid-tier dose has, at this first Saturday of the third-dose-lift, been taken. The telling is the kind of telling a son makes to his future mother-in-law about his father's dose-lift."
I said: "I will."
She said: "Walk safely. Both of you."
She didn't turn when she said it. The water was running in the sink. I looked at her back — the pale-blue apron, the patch at the left side that still didn't quite match — and then I turned and walked out.
In the hallway I stopped for a moment at the row of hooks where the coats hung. Father's good coat, the one he wore for medical visits. Mother's winter coat with the missing button at the third hole, replaced by a different button she'd matched as close as she could. Wanqing's dark coat already back on its hook. The small archive of a family, arranged on a row of iron hooks in a hallway on Pingjiang Road.
I put my own coat on and walked out.
In the first timeline she had not made the osmanthus rice a second time. There had not, in that timeline, been a reason to.
***
We left at 2:42.
Father at the western chair raised one hand at the glass. Mother walked to the gate without the apron — she'd taken it off before coming out, which was what she did when a goodbye needed to be presentable.
We took the No. 4 bus. We took the 3:18 train. Hangzhou north at 6:54. Western lane intersection at 7:30. The platform at Hangzhou north was colder than Suzhou's had been — the wind off the main road, the smell of diesel and city air, the light from the departure board going green-yellow on the pavement. I had been making this return trip long enough that my body had learned to shift between the two cities without being asked. Wanqing's hand briefly on my left wrist — tenth use.
I walked west to A-7.
***
In my chest the second voice — *four-month-flat*, soon to be *five-month-flat* — was quiet. The first voice — the old counter — said:
*Father took the third-dose-lift. By the late-spring weekly the projection may be at the five-month-flat. The five-month-flat is the pre-2017 reading he had not in 2014 expected to reach. The Saturday after Sister Lin — February the seventh — at the soybean-milk-recipe pancakes. Sister Lin Sat Jan 31 — bring the pencil. The Article 14 hearing Feb 18.*
I lay down at 5:42 PM IRL.
I slept.
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