第 005 Ch.| Biology Class

March 16, 2065. Monday. 13:00.

First afternoon period.

The students of Class 2-3 drifted back to the room from the school store, the bathrooms, the yard. The biology textbook sat on the desks, Chapter 7, "Animal Behavior."

Ah-Zhe had taken leave and gone home; his seat was empty. Xiaowen was back, in the third row on the aisle side, head down, sorting her biology notes.

13:05. Teacher Lin came in.

The same Teacher Lin from the hallway between periods that morning. Mid-thirties, glasses, hair tied back low. Today she wore a dark-grey knit sweater with the cuffs folded up once. There was a patch of chalk dust on the outside of her elbow — she'd probably been teaching the class next door the period before.

In her left hand she carried a small tote, the canvas kind teachers used, cream-colored. It bulged; it must have held the materials for today.

Gu Mingye remembered this tote. Teacher Lin had brought a microscope in it once last semester.

She set the book down on the lectern and nodded to the class.

"Good afternoon."

The class gave back a lazy line.

Teacher Lin opened the book.

"Today we're on Chapter 7, Animal Behavior. Section three, individual recognition in social animals. Turn to page 142."

Gu Mingye opened the book.

Teacher Lin's gaze went from the front rows to the back.

At Gu Mingye's seat it stopped about a second.

Then it kept going.

She didn't skip him.

That morning, in English, Teacher Li's eyes had reached him and turned the page without pausing. Teacher Lin had paused this one second, like she was confirming he was still in that seat.

Gu Mingye looked down at the book.

---

"Animals in a group use a lot of ways to recognize other individuals," Teacher Lin said. "Sight and sound are the ones everyone knows. But there's another one humans have mostly lost — smell."

From under the lectern she took out a clear plastic box. Inside was a wad of cotton, soaked in something, by the look of it.

"Ants use their antennae to touch the chemicals on another's body, to tell nestmate from outsider. Bees use the smell of the hive to decide who gets into the comb. Bats use echo to find their own young — even in a dark cave, thousands of them packed together, the mother bat still finds hers."

She took the cotton out of the box and set it on the windowsill in the sun.

"This kind of recognition has nothing to do with sight. Nothing to do with sound. It's chemical."

She went back to the lectern and went on.

"Here's the point. In animal groups, sometimes a situation comes up. An individual whose appearance and behavior haven't changed at all, but the others start to instinctively avoid it."

She paused.

Some of the students were taking notes, some marking the book with highlighters, some slumped over asleep. Nobody felt there was anything to this part.

Gu Mingye looked up.

Teacher Lin didn't look at him.

"This avoidance isn't because the individual did anything wrong. It's because there's a mark on it — one the others can smell, but it can't smell on itself."

Teacher Lin turned a page.

"That mark is sometimes disease, sometimes an abnormal hormone, and sometimes it's just a 'different' the others haven't been able to sort yet."

She looked up.

This time she looked at Gu Mingye.

She didn't just let her eyes land on him the way she had before. This time, she looked into his eyes.

"The group's instinct is to avoid first and sort later."

When she'd said it, she moved her gaze away again, to the class.

"On page 145 of the book there's an experiment. They sprayed a healthy duck with the scent off a dead duck, then put it back in the group." Teacher Lin turned a page. "The healthy duck's appearance and behavior didn't change, but the group started to keep away from it."

She looked at the book.

"Later the experimenters washed the duck clean and put it back. The group's attitude didn't come back right away. It took a few days before the other ducks would come near it again."

Teacher Lin closed the book.

"This next part is the point of the lesson."

She went to the blackboard and wrote a line.

A group never explains why it avoids. But an individual can choose whether to let being avoided break it.

She finished, turned, and looked at the class.

"There's a quiz next period. Pages 142 to 148."

The bell rang.

---

13:50. End of period.

The students poured out.

Gu Mingye stayed in his seat, looking at the line on the board.

Teacher Lin packed up the lectern. The book and the sun-warmed cotton went back into the tote. She held the plastic box in her hand.

Before she left, she passed beside Gu Mingye's seat.

Didn't stop.

But as she passed, the index finger of her left hand tapped the cover of his textbook, lightly. Once.

The movement was very slight. Just once.

Then she walked out.

Gu Mingye looked down at the cover of his book.

It was the school-issue biology textbook, white, with a butterfly printed on it.

Where Teacher Lin had tapped was on the butterfly.

No particular mark there.

But he knew what Teacher Lin was telling him — I see it.

On her way out, a student from another class greeted her in the hall, "Hello, Teacher Lin." Teacher Lin answered "good afternoon," her voice exactly as steady as it had been in class.

That "nothing happened" answer made Gu Mingye surer of one thing — Teacher Lin knew exactly what she'd just done in class. She simply couldn't come over and tell him outright.

---

14:00. Second period.

Math.

The math teacher was another man in his thirties. He came in and started on quadratic functions.

He didn't skip Gu Mingye in the roll.

"Gu Mingye."

"Here." Gu Mingye raised his hand.

The math teacher looked up, glanced over. Not at Gu Mingye's face, at him, a single tick, then on to the next name.

The same as all the looks all day.

Only the math teacher knew the name "Gu Mingye," so he still called it.

Gu Mingye lowered his hand.

He sat in his seat looking at the quadratic graph on the board.

X squared plus some constant. On the coordinate plane that was a parabola opening upward.

Teacher Lin's words from biology were in his head.

A group never explains why it avoids. But an individual can choose whether to let being avoided break it.

Teacher Lin hadn't said it plainly. But she hadn't been talking to him about biology, either.

She'd been telling him what was happening to him right now.

---

15:00. Third period.

P.E. Turned into a study hall. The P.E. teacher was out and there was no substitute, so the homeroom teacher told everyone to study on their own.

The room was loud. Gu Mingye opened his bag and put the day's textbooks in one by one.

His own notebook was in the bag's inner pocket. He hadn't taken it out since last night.

He thought for a moment, took it out, opened it.

The red paper slip with the "過" character in black ink was still tucked between that day's page and the next.

With his thumb, lightly, he felt the ink in the middle.

Still there. Still held up by some moisture. Not dry.

He put the notebook back in the bag.

Beside him Xiaowen glanced up at him, then looked back down.

---

15:50. Fourth period.

Geography. The teacher's topic today was river landforms. Alluvial fans, river terraces, old riverbeds.

When he got to "old riverbeds," the example he gave was the Qing-dynasty channel cut through Qingcheng's old town, later filled in, later capped by the metal shell of the Rivermag Line.

"Some of you, walking from home to school, are walking right on top of the old riverbed. The quiz next period will cover this."

Gu Mingye didn't take notes.

He knew. He'd walked it every day for three years.

The geography teacher went on. "Under the old riverbed they later ran the city's water mains and gas lines, and over that came the metal shell of the Rivermag. People today can't see any of it. But things below don't stop existing just because you can't see them."

The geography teacher didn't look at Gu Mingye.

He was talking about river landforms.

But when Gu Mingye heard "things below don't stop existing just because you can't see them," his heart skipped.

Whether the geography teacher was the same kind of person as Teacher Lin in biology — he wasn't sure.

But he was starting to suspect that Teacher Lin wasn't the only one at school who knew about this.

---

16:30. The bell for the end of the day.

He shouldered his bag and went out of the room with the rest of the class.

Nobody said hello to him. Nobody said "see you tomorrow."

He walked out of Class 2-3. Down the stairs, across the yard, to the gate.

Uncle Zhang was sitting in the guard booth.

Gu Mingye walked past.

Uncle Zhang didn't look up. The paper was turned halfway, stopped there. His eyes were on the page, but he wasn't reading.

Like he didn't dare look up and watch Gu Mingye walk out.

Gu Mingye passed the booth, out the gate.

He headed toward Shuyuan Station on the Rivermag Line.

He'd gone about a hundred meters when he stopped.

The apartment building across the street was right at his left hand.

He looked up at the second floor.

The curtain on that window was now pulled open a crack.

Not the same crack as at noon — that one had been in the middle of the window. This one was at the far right edge, against the frame.

No one in the gap.

He stood where he was about ten seconds.

Then he crossed over and went to the foot of the building across the street.

---

17:00. The foot of the building.

It was the kind of old walk-up you found in Qingcheng's old town. Five floors, no elevator. The ground floor was a noodle shop, not open yet, the roller shutter down.

The entrance was next to the shop, a narrow iron door. Above it was a faded notice: "No littering."

The door wasn't locked.

Gu Mingye pushed through.

Inside was a small vestibule, the floor that early kind of green patterned tile. On the wall was a bank of mailboxes, ten units in all. Each was supposed to have a household's surname and unit number on it.

But for the unit on the second floor — 202 — the box was blank.

The other nine all had names — Wang, Chen, Lin, Li, Zhang, Huang, Ye, He, Lai.

Only 202 had none.

Gu Mingye looked up the stairwell.

No light in it. At this time of the afternoon it was still bright enough.

He went to the foot of the stairs and looked up toward the second floor.

Two units up there — 201 and 202. Outside 201's door sat a pair of slippers, and on the floor a flyer left by a delivery courier.

Outside 202's door there was nothing.

The door was shut.

He stood at the foot of the stairs about thirty seconds.

He knew going up wouldn't help.

If the person was there to watch him, then he'd go up and knock, and they could choose not to open, choose to go out the back window, choose to just vanish — a three-story walk-up always had another way out.

If the person wasn't there to watch him, then knocking would only get him taken for a student who'd come to the wrong door.

Either way, he had no next move to make.

And he knew that even if he turned around now and went back across the street and looked up at that second-floor window — the gap in the curtain wouldn't still be in the same spot.

The person was better at this than he was.

Gu Mingye went to the mailboxes.

Behind the clear cover of 202 it was empty. No name, and no "no advertising" sticker of the kind you saw on the others.

Like nobody had lived there in a long time.

But at noon he'd plainly seen someone behind that second-floor window.

He crouched and pushed the box's cover open a crack.

Empty inside.

Not even one flyer.

The other nine boxes had at least two or three takeout menus or election cards.

Only 202 was clean.

Like someone had just cleared it out.

Or like the box had never taken any mail at all.

Gu Mingye put the cover back.

Stood up.

Went toward the door.

At the iron door he looked back at the unit on the second floor.

No one in the stairwell.

He pushed the door open and went out.

Out on Shuyuan Street the traffic was heavier at the end of the school day. School buses and cars mixed together, motorbikes behind them. Students walked the sidewalk in twos and threes, some toward the Rivermag station, some toward the cram-school street.

Gu Mingye blended into the crowd of students.

He headed toward the station. But halfway there he stopped.

The second-floor window of the old building across the street was out of sight now — a bus had just gone by and blocked it for a second. After it passed, the window came back.

The curtain was shut. You couldn't tell the gap had ever been pulled open.

But he knew the person from before probably hadn't left yet.

Or had already left.

On Shuyuan Street he turned around and kept on toward the station.

He wasn't going to cram school today. Today he was going straight home.

---

【Ch. 005 End · Qingcheng Municipal Second High School → the foot of the old apartment across the street】