by J. M. Lee
“Are you saying that you calculated this whole column in your head, faster than a calculator?”
I shrugged.
A deep voice boomed from near the window, startling us. “Huang, are you done yet?” We hadn’t noticed the man, who had been feeding a parrot in a cage hanging by the window.
“Yes, sir,” the man said, his demeanor suddenly deferential.
“Bring the books. Don’t waste my time.”
Huang shoved his ledger in a black leather bag and stood up. “Coming, sir.”
Dash and I followed Huang across the living room. The man with the parrot was just over fifty and as large as a bear. Deep wrinkles were set in his narrow forehead, which was topped with thick graying hair, and his nose appeared flat from the excess flesh on his face. He turned toward us.
Dash placed our bags down and wiped the sweat beaded between the folds of his neck. The guards gathered around our bags and emptied them. They cut the bottom of the bags open. To our great surprise, they took out plastic bags filled with white powder. One of them dipped a finger in the powder, tasted it, and nodded.
“Well done,” the big man said pleasantly. “Rest up before your journey back.”
Dash threw himself on his knees and pulled me down next to him. His thin shirt was plastered on his sweaty back. “We didn’t come all the way here to rest, sir,” he said urgently. “We have nowhere to go.”
“Go back to where you came from,” the big man said airily.
“SPSD agents are all over Yanji. They’re looking for us.” Dash began to sound desperate. “We’ll do anything you want. Please don’t send us back.”
The parrot squawked. Its owner stroked its yellow feathers. “I suppose I can’t send away a bird that flew into my arms on its own,” he said, as if to himself, and motioned to one of the guards.
Dash bowed, resting his head on the marble floor. I didn’t know what was going on but followed his lead. The floor felt nice and cold; I stayed still for a long time until one of the guards tugged me away.
Kunlun was what people called the man with the parrot, after the enormous mountain range spanning 2,500 kilometers with 5,000-meter-tall peaks. Renowned for its extreme arid and cold climate that was harsh on animals and vegetation, the mountain range was the source of both the Yellow River and the Yangtze River as they wound through the entire country. Like his namesake, Kunlun was enormous. His voice rumbled and his actions were slow but unpredictable. He would be sunny but suddenly cloud over, morphing quickly into a blizzard. People found it difficult to remain near him, so he was often alone.
But Dash and I were different. We could live anywhere as long as there was water and air. We lived behind the mansion, doing any kind of work that was needed. In the early morning, we went shopping for food; we repaired the walls and paved the stone path in the garden; we planted or moved trees; we cleaned the septic tank. Many people ordered us around—the two gardeners, the four cooks, the four housekeepers, the three drivers, and the seven bodyguards. Dash didn’t mind; he was just grateful that we had been allowed to stay. “Thousands of farmers from all over the country come here and end up living in the dirtiest, darkest corners,” Dash explained to me. “Mr. Kunlun lived in poverty when he was our age. We can be rich like him by the time we’re his age.” Dash looked off into the distance dreamily.
Hailing from the highlands of Tibet, Kunlun left home with nothing, wandering the border region shared with Myanmar and Thailand. He managed to gild his life by growing poppies in the backwoods, extracting their white powder, and selling it in the cities. C10H15N, molecular weight: 149.23 g/mol. Hydrogen in amphetamine was swapped out for the methyl group to make methamphetamine. He arrived in Shanghai at thirty; drugs had brought him immense wealth, allowing him to build a citadel of riches. He bought buildings and people, amassing bodyguards, household staff, lawyers, accountants, the Bureau of Public Security, politicians, businessmen, and prosecutors. At age forty Kunlun was arrested for dealing drugs, but he was freed on bail after his large legal team bribed the judge. He even managed to buy off the prosecutor who had initiated the proceedings against him. Shanghai was his fiefdom.
Dash revered Kunlun. He decided that he would become something more than a mere laborer. He began to transform his flab into hard muscle, working hard at his new project until he was one day allowed to prove his mettle. That sunny day, Dash was working in the garden when a black car screeched to a stop in front of the mansion; two assailants jumped out. Guards managed to chase them from the gates but the assailants were faster. Dash threw down his shears and ran instinctively toward them, but he was no match for professionals. All he could do was stand firm under their blows. Finally, his meaty fist nailed an assailant’s chin, giving the guards enough time to catch up and subdue the men. When he caught his breath, he heard applause behind him. The head of security smiled approvingly. “You’re as big as an elephant but as fast and strong. It’s a waste for you to be a handyman.” Dash was immediately reassigned to be a bodyguard, and was issued a black suit and a pair of sunglasses. He was told to move his belongings to the staff rooms on the second floor. Looking worried, Dash asked the head of security if I could share his room, but was shot down.
“But it would be a waste for Gil-mo to be a handyman, too,” Dash explained. “He’s a math genius. A walking calculator. He’s really very talented with numbers.”
The head of security pursed his lips and cocked his head. The next day, he brought us to the living room, where we found Kunlun and Huang. My eyes swept over the symmetry of the room—the desk placed squarely in the middle, the curtains tied neatly on either side of the windows, and two juniper trees standing at attention outside, across from each other. Kunlun was winding a large grandfather clock in the corner with a watch key. In Gilmoese, 6:30 was a polite servant, both hands held neatly together. 10:10 signified something to celebrate, open arms cheering happily. I thought about the complicated world behind the face of the clock, the interlocking gears, the tightly wound springs, the motion of a pendulum marking the one second it took to go from one end to the other, driving the two hands. Kunlun closed the glass cover. The pendulum began to swing gently. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Kunlun blocked the sunlight and his graying hair formed ice caps on his head. “The walking calculator, I presume?” he said, turning toward me.
I just liked numbers and calculations; I wasn’t a calculator.
“That’s him,” the head of security answered.
Kunlun looked me over. “Time passes quickly when you’re old,” he murmured to himself. “You can see your life rushing past your very eyes by the time you’re my age.”
I perked up. The relativity of time, my favorite topic. “Time is elastic. Like the phenomenon of time delay,” I began. “When you throw a ball inside a moving train, you have to add the speed of the train to the speed of the ball. When the speed of the ball is constant, what would be the speed of the ball in a stopped train?” I went over to the desk and drew a picture on a sheet of paper.
Everyone just stared at me.
“Einstein explained the time delay phenomenon through the theory of relativity,” I continued. “Light traveling from a to b looks straight when you’re inside the train, but it looks slanted in the direction of the train’s movement from outside the train. The premise of the theory of relativity is the principle that the speed of light is always constant. It means that light does not travel 300,000 kilometers a second but that light traveling 300,000 kilometers is one second. Time equals distance divided by speed, but if speed is constant time becomes smaller in proportion to the distance. If you think of the distance ab as 100 and the distance ac as 110, 100 units of time passes in the train while 110 units of time passed outside. The flow of time in a space that moves and a space that is stopped is different and out of sync.”
The four looked even more confused.
“As we get older, each day becomes less significant. One day for a ten-day-old baby is 1/10. One day for a one-year-old is
1/365. If the child is born in January or February of a leap year, it’s 1/366. For a ten-year-old it’s 1/3,652, and for a twenty-year-old it’s 1/7,300 plus the number of leap years. For a fifty-year-old it’s 1/18,250 plus the number of leap years. The value of a day shrinks in inverse proportion to one’s age. So one day is experienced differently depending on how old you are.”
Kunlun started laughing. “A walking calculator, indeed. He’ll be good to have around.”
“I’m not a walking calculator, but I’ll be good to have around,” I said. “You’re kind.”
“I’ve never heard that before.” Kunlun grinned. “You can help with the ledgers for the household. That’ll free Huang up so he can concentrate on the company’s books.”
The staff rooms were bigger, brighter, and cleaner than the handyman quarters, and they didn’t smell like mold or rust. Our room was in perfect symmetry, which pleased me; we had two beds, two small desks, two tables, two lamps, and two picture frames, one side of the room mirroring the other. I continued my handyman tasks while handling the books, buying Kunlun’s favorite fruits at the market, changing lightbulbs, and fixing leaky faucets, as well as recommending that we reduce the number of gardeners instead of the cooking staff and installing a computer in the living room. Every morning at six a.m., I took the six papers from the deliveryman and brought them in. I scanned the papers from Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, New York, and Seoul, reading aloud headlines and important articles about politics, major crimes, and the economy as Kunlun had breakfast. Afterward, I cleaned out the birdcage and replenished the food and water, then cleaned the house. Kunlun taught me how to play go. Though I had hung out with Jae-ha over the go board, I had been more focused on the geometric shapes made by the straight lines of the board and the white and black stones. Kunlun seemed to enjoy the process of instruction more than winning. Every day at four p.m., we stopped what we were doing and played go. A few weeks after my first lesson, I won easily. Kunlun laughed heartily. “I’ve been playing my whole life, but lost to you!”
Every Sunday, the staff took time off in shifts. Dash and I would sleep in, then go to Shanghai Station to watch women getting off the train, looking exhausted. We would walk along the river as the setting sun dyed the water a deep golden hue, and wander down narrow alleys lined with glass doors lit by red bulbs. Women in short chipao and thick makeup giggled, grabbing for us. Dash sauntered ahead of me as I shook them off, prompting them to curse at me. I was always looking for Yong-ae, but I was glad that I never spotted her there.
When I had Sunday morning off, I would visit libraries. I would walk among the tall bookshelves, searching for The Odyssey. Did Yong-ae ever do what I was doing? Did she end up reading the book? Eventually, I made it through thirty-four library branches. The thirty-fifth was a small library by the Yellow River. I ran my finger along the spines until I got to The Odyssey. It was covered in dust. I opened the back cover to check the card. The list started with Jiang Shenzhu on November 21, 1998, and ended with Liu Minglin on June 2, 2003. Fourteen people had checked it out in those five years, and six had borrowed it since 2002. Li Lin, Zhang Ming, Liu Jiawei, Hong Xuancheng, Cao Jialing, and Liu Minglin. I began to read the book idly until I came upon the page where Odysseus returns to Ithaca. I spotted the number written in the margin.
77772
She had been here. Yong-ae had come to this very library and opened this book. Two years ago, I had told her about Kaprekar numbers in front of the rabbit cages. “Somewhere in India, there was a sign that said ‘3025 km’ next to a railroad,” I had explained. “One day, Kaprekar, who was a mathematician, saw that the sign had fallen over in a storm and had split into two. It was now 30 and 25. If you add 30 to 25, you get 55, and 552 is 3025. So if you split this number in half and add the two parts together and square it, it becomes the number you start with. In Gilmoese, this means that even things that go their separate ways will meet again.”
What had Yong-ae said when I told her this story? I couldn’t remember. But I recalled what I had told her after explaining Kaprekar’s constant—7777 was the square root of the eight-digit Kaprekar number 60481729. I thought of all the Kaprekar numbers.
81: 8 + 1 = 9, 92 = 81
9801: 98 + 01 = 99, 992 = 9801
2025: 20 + 25 = 45, 452 = 2025
3025: 30 + 25 = 55, 552 = 3025
998001: 998 + 001 = 999, 9992 = 998001
To the right of 77772 I wrote 6048 and 1729. I was elated. The formula was now complete. Yong-ae had remembered Gilmoese. This was her way of leaving me a message. She, too, believed that we would meet again. I took the book with me to the front desk and asked for the previous borrowers’ contact information, but the librarian told me she couldn’t give that out. That was all right, though; she had read this book here, and she still remembered our language. The smell of her hair wound itself around me as I put the book back.
I floated home along the banks of the Yellow River.
“Did something good happen?” Kunlun asked when he saw me. “You look very pleased with yourself.”
I didn’t answer and went straight up to my room.
PALE DAYTIME MOON
Kunlun owned three cars with three-liter engines—a Mercedes-Benz, a Lexus, and a Hyundai Equus—and his three drivers were on call around the clock, playing mahjongg as they waited by the garage. Kunlun often preferred to walk to his appointments, and when he did I went along. The July sun blasted the sidewalk and hot air snaked up my legs. I made up games with numbers I encountered in the street, picking them out from signs and license plates and even branching into addresses and the number of floors in a building. I thought of the street with an empty lot next to three-, one-, and four-story buildings as Pi Street. Prime Number Street was the busy thoroughfare lined with eleven-, thirteen-, seventeen-, and nineteen-story buildings. Luxury cars, buses, taxis, and bicycles rolled past in a jumble. I preferred the cars with the older license plates, composed solely of numbers without any Latin letters. I caught the lucky license plate number 88888—with 8 pronounced ba, similar to fa in fa chai, meaning to earn wealth, that must have been unimaginably expensive to obtain. With 9 signifying plenty and 7 resembling the word for happiness, both of those numbers would have also been at a premium.
Kunlun purchased a fine suit at a department store and sticky cockroach traps at a rundown marketplace. We bought a few other things. I counted out the bills and he put the receipts in his pocket.
“Would you like something cold to drink?” Kunlun asked as he strode ahead.
“Coca-Cola, please.”
He got himself a green tea and handed me a can of Coke. With a hiss, the gas escaped. My tongue prickled, and I felt rich. It reminded me of Jae-ha.
Back home, I put the food in the refrigerator and placed the new pruning shears in the shed. I planted the new flower seeds in the garden and watered them, and changed the rubber ring in a leaky faucet. Kunlun unfolded the receipts and recorded them in his ledger, using a large calculator. “Double check that everything’s accurate, Gil-mo.”
I took a look at savory 5s, warm 8s, and mushroomy 3s. Nine had the funk of long-fermented food, and 7 crunched and shattered. “The calculations are correct but the sum is wrong.”
Kunlun peered at his ledger.
“The fedora was twenty percent off,” I reminded him. “It was marked as 2,300 yuan, but we only paid 1,840 yuan. But the full price is on the receipt. You forgot to tally our drinks, since we didn’t get a receipt. One cup of green tea is 2 yuan and the Coke was 4 yuan. So you have to subtract 460 yuan and add 6 yuan. The sum should be 4,396 yuan.” I dumped the coins out of his wallet and counted the bills. “Since you have 1,787 yuan in your wallet, that checks out. You initially had 6,183 yuan.”
Beginning the next day, Kunlun allowed me to reconcile the receipts.
Dash and I began accompanying Kunlun on a special outing each Wednesday and Friday. Dash sat next to the driver and I was in the back with Kunlun. The Mercedes drove into an ex
clusive residential area in Gubei. Kids giggled on swings; balls bounced merrily on expansive tennis courts; large, well-groomed dogs barked under verandas; and a yellow school bus let out an orderly line of schoolchildren. We drove up to a gated community with a sign that said EASTERN MANHATTAN. The CCTV over the gate blinked, reading our license plate, and we were let in. The car glided along the hedge-lined driveway and stopped at an opulent Victorian-style four-story building, which had two entrances. Large terraces flanked either side of the entrances. Dash lumbered out and opened the door for Kunlun, who got out and smoothed his clothes, and they went into the entrance to the right.
The driver loosened his bowtie and leaned his seat back. “We’re free to do whatever until he comes back out.”
I sat still in the backseat. I didn’t pay attention to the loud whine of cicadas or squint against the bright sunlight.
The driver poked his head out of the window and looked up. “Do you know how expensive that place is?” he asked conspiratorially. “I went in once to do an errand. It’s like an emperor lives there! The floor is made of shiny black marble. Even the walls are marble, but they’re brown. We’ll never be able to afford a place like that, even if we work our entire lives.”
I looked up, too. “So a really rich person lives here, then?”
“Well, if you’re really pretty, you can live in a place like this.” He turned to grin at me. “An old rich man and a poor beautiful girl have a lot of things the other person wants.”
“Like what?”
The driver shook his head. “Money and time, of course. The old man buys time and the pretty girl makes money. You know. The oldest deal in the history of the world.”
I didn’t understand. How could you buy time, and how could you make money with your looks?
