After the rewrite, they gave me three days — why, they didn’t explain: just three days of freedom from lessons and from Wei Lin with his explanations, the kind that usually make you want to lie down and never get up. Three days of silence, during which, for the first time in twenty-eight years, I stopped counting — the cracks in the ceiling, the percentages of coherence, the particles of memory; counting let go of me first, and everything else was still holding on.
On the fourth day Wei Lin came, sat on the step, and the standard configuration reassembled itself — tea, Schrodinger on his knees, — only now it was tuned half a tone below the usual.
— There’s one thing, — he said. — An old one. Finish it — and go.
— What thing?