Chang’e 11

Shen Wu woke up to the sound of the phone ringing beside his bed. It whined like a sick animal, flashing blue, projecting twisted shadows against the walls of the dark room.

His wife shifted beside him, and he turned to see if she had been disturbed by the electronic intrusion. She was lying with her back to him. Her shoulder blades slid beneath her smooth skin. She groaned and pulled the blanket up around her small shoulders. Beyond her, long arteries of rain streaked the window, each drop holding the green and red neons of the city lights.

“Shen. Private call,” he said, clearing his throat. The ringing stopped. A man’s ragged breath reverberated in his inner-ear receptanode.

“Wéi … nho,” Shen said softly, rubbing his eyes and looking at the time on the phone. It was 1:34 am. “Who is this?”

“Shen? It’s Quon,” a voice replied.

“Quon?” Shen slid up against the cold wall at the head of his bed. “It’s one-thirty in the morning.”

“Can you sleep?” Quon asked.

Can you sleep? Shen thought. What kind of a question is that, can you sleep?

“I was sleeping, if that’s what you mean.”

“Were you?” Quon said, his voice nervy. “So you can then. That’s good. That’s good. I can’t. Not like I used to, anyway …”

“Quon? What is it? What’s this all about?”

“I need to talk to you, Shen,” Quon said, his tone passive, panicked, as if he had been asked to make the call at gunpoint but didn’t want to give away the gravity of his situation. “I need to talk to you right now.”

“Okay, well. We are. We’re talking.”

“No,” Quon cut in. “No. No phone-nodes. I have to see you in person. Meet me at The Glimmer Room in twenty minutes. I’ll be there.”

“What? Wait—”

But Quon had already hung up, severing any chance of making an excuse not to go.

Shen frowned in the darkness. He looked to his side and touched the small exposed patch of his wife’s shoulder. Hua moaned softly again but went on sleeping. Her skin was soft and firm—softer and firmer than he remembered it ever being in the eighteen years they’d been married. He knew she was a woman who took care of herself, but ever since his return to earth his wife had seemed younger and more beautiful than ever. At the time of his arrival, he had attributed it to having spent such a long time away from her—drifting through the loveless, inhuman chaos of the universe and staring at the cold, geometric machinery—but it had been weeks since his return, and the novelty of her suddenly-realised beauty had not worn thin. If anything, every day he found himself more impressed by her, more baffled by her ageless body.

“I’m going out for a bit,” he whispered, and kissed her on the cheek. The skin on her cheek was cold. She murmured something—a lazy semblance of words. Shen covered her with the blanket and got out of bed. He went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, turning his face from side to side.

He was getting older. There was no escaping that fact. His eyes were buried in satchels of skin. The lines that connected the sides of his nose to the edges of his mouth were deeper and longer. His hair was thinning, just as his father’s had done, and his earlobes were wide now, and dangling.

Perhaps, he thought, it was because of everything he had seen. Perhaps we were not yet ready to behold those nebulae in the furthest reaches, those spiralling vortexes of ancient matter, that vast raw core of existence. Out there, from the windows of his vessel, he had seen the birthplace of time. They all had: Quon and the seven other astrominers aboard Chang’e 11. And perhaps now it was time to pay back all those free trips through time with a few extra wrinkles, thinning crowns, and enlarged ear lobes …

Quon.

Something was wrong. He had never known Quon to be a skittish man with a flair for such cloak-’n’-dagger dramatics. Quon had always been reserved and composed. A straight arrow and a sharp shooter, as they used to say in those old American movies. The space program didn’t choose paranoiacs and unstable neurotics, especially when they were going to be restricted to the claustrophobic confines of a lone space vessel, and Quon had been no exception. Also, Shen had spent almost nine years with Quon up in that contraption; if ever there was a place to get to know someone, it was there.

So was he now suffering some kind of agoraphobia? It wasn’t impossible. Even Shen had had to get used to being back on earth. He too had felt uneasy about this place he called his home. It wasn’t that everything had changed too much in the time he’d been away, but rather that too little had changed. All the expectations he’d had aboard Chang’e 11 of feeling left behind by a new world had not come to pass.

An unsettling feeling, and he didn’t think it was all in his head.

After all, time shouldn’t stand still for anything or anyone. We expect cities to expand, oceans to rise, the human body to get older—but none of that had happened on the earth he had come back to. Too much was the same: The same people. The same technologies. The same problems. In some cases, even the same goddamn hairstyles. The same but not the same—like a deeply loved song overplayed until it becomes almost impossible to stomach listening to it.

That’s exactly it, he thought, looking at his reflection. Nothing has changed—nothing but you. You’ve changed, Shen. You’ve definitely gained a wrinkle or two.

Even so, had he really grown as old as he thought, or had the eerie stagnancy of the world around him simply emphasised the otherwise ordinary marks of ageing?

Shen rubbed his eyes and looked at his bleary reflection again. Time to wake up, be alert for Quon. He ran the water into the basin and splashed it into his face, then dabbed his face dry with a towel. He dressed quickly and quietly left the apartment. The hallway was empty, dimly lit by mustard-tinted lamps. Identical wooden doors stood alongside each other, just as they had done before he left, but as Shen passed along them, he felt the hallway was longer than he had imagined, with a few more doors at the end. That can’t be true, he told himself. It was evidently his brain kick-starting itself from the deep sleep Quon had disturbed. A forty-seven-year-old wife with unusually youthful skin was one thing, a lengthened hallway in a fifty-storey apartment block was another.

He took the elevator to the bottom and stepped out into the cold, wet street. The Glimmer Room was a good twenty-minute walk from where he stood. He could grab a taxi, he thought, but he could do with some fresh air, a bit of time to prepare himself for whatever it was Quon was so eager to tell him. So he pulled up his collar and took to the street.

Shen hadn’t seen Quon for at least two months. Not since the last round of interviews, when everyone had finally lost interest in the crew’s dramatic return from their voyage. The last time he’d seen Quon had been at that awkward dinner with the executives. Quon had been there with his wife, a quiet woman who’d attached herself to her husband like a pretty little cufflink and smiled carefully at all the right lines. Conversation hadn’t exactly flowed that night (most of the astrominers had difficulty talking freely about their nine isolated years), but Quon had not seemed particularly out of place. His wife had selected his meals for him, with no thanks from him. No surprises there. On Chang’e 11, his nickname had been Mr. Droid because of his stony and mechanical nature. When their meals had finally arrived he’d dismantled and ingested each course like he was performing an important task. Once again, nothing unusual for Quon.

At the end of the night, Quon bowed, shook hands all round, then left with his wife in a taxi.

That was all Shen remembered of the last time he’d seen him, so what had happened since then? What had led to that rock-headed man falling to pieces?

As Shen walked along the damp street to The Glimmer Room, he studied the world and its people like an undercover anthropologist. Neon lights reflected in the puddles and windscreens of cars. Flashing arrows brought brothels and clubs to the attention of passers-by. Shen slowed to look across the street. Thin, vam-piric teenagers were standing out on the pavement, draped over the takeout counter of a small roadside diner, hassling a plump teenage clerk. A blob-like autovehicle whooshed through the water that had flooded the centre of the street.

This was the world Shen knew, he was certain. There was no mistaking these few details. But still, something was wrong with it all. He couldn’t say what, except that once again the details were too precise … too familiar. Surely those wasted kids at the counter had been there the night before when Shen had walked along that same street with his wife? Not kids who looked like them either, but those self-same kids.

Okay, he thought, perhaps they had. So what?

He had to concede that that alone would be nothing extraordinary; it might have been their second, third or fourth night out for all Shen knew. They might have made an unfortunate habit out of harassing that fat, pimple-faced clerk in the silly white hairnet and the stained white butcher’s coat.

But still.

The way that one with the bad teeth and electrically charged hairstyle mocked the clerk while the rest of the squad cackled—hadn’t he made the same dumb gag the night before? The way that skinny girl with the smeared eye make-up leaned over the counter to wrench the clerk forward and kiss him on the lips—how many nights in a row would she tease the poor boy with the same cruel gesture?

Shen was thinking all of these things when, prompted by some sort of collective thought, they all turned to look at him. Shen’s heart skipped a beat as their animated expressions fell away, and they swivelled their heads to eye him as he passed. Even the clerk was now staring, as if he had suddenly been accepted into their fraternity by their shared captivation. In Shen’s mind, there was no explaining it; he was on the other side of the street. He couldn’t imagine why he’d caught their attention, or how they’d all known he’d been watching them in the first place.

Shen ducked his head and hurried along the street. He hailed a passing taxi and told the driver to take him to The Glimmer Room. Those staring teenagers, he told himself, figments of my imagination. You’re getting paranoid in your old age, Shen. They’d probably either mistaken him for someone else or hadn’t been looking at him at all. Had there been someone walking behind him perhaps? Someone they would have known? He didn’t know and he didn’t have time to think much more about them. All he wanted was get to The Glimmer Room, figure out the business with Quon, and get back to his warm bed.

He watched the streets through the window of the taxi. Dark, drenched and hopeless, he didn’t feel as if he was moving through them as much as they were moving past him—as if the hawkers, prostitutes, the drunks and the homeless were standing on the open platforms of a gigantic train going in the other direction, all of them casually unaware they were being led to a place of execution: a death camp, a slaughterhouse, to plunge off the edge of an unfinished bridge.

Shen sighed, sat back in his seat, and looked ahead. A pair of plastic black cue balls dangled from the rear-view mirror. The back of the driver’s big head was set square on his shoulders as if it had little need of a neck.

“Miserable night, huh?” Shen said.

The driver said nothing, and the car kept cruising down the street. And let’s all just make it a little more miserable, shall we? Shen thought. He abandoned any attempt at chitchat and sat back in his seat. The vehicle turned a corner and finally came to a stop outside The Glimmer Room. On the dashboard, the fee flashed on an LED display and Shen placed his thumb on the square glass plate beside it. His print was fed into the machine and the amount was deducted from his account. Then the door opened and he got out.

“Thanks for the—” he tried to say, but the door shut instantly and the car pulled back onto the street, vanishing silently into the night.

Shen looked up at the flashing sign for The Glimmer Room. He nodded at the bouncer perched on his stool like an overfed parrot and went through the doorway.

The ramshackle bar was quiet. The barman was behind the counter with a clipboard, lining up half-bottles of hard liquor and taking stock. In the corner, two men played an unhurried game of pool, dense clouds of cigarette smoke hanging over their heads as if they’d been playing for days already.

Quon was sitting at the end of the bar, nursing a short drink. Shen walked up to him, took off his coat and pulled out a stool.

“Quon,” he said.

Quon turned, snapping out of a daze. Shen was shocked. Quon looked like a terrible effigy of the conservative, mathematical, military man he had once been: his hair was shaggy and dishevelled, his eyes sunken, his skin creased. This was not the unemotional, disciplined scientist Shen had come to respect aboard Chang’e 11 … Quon smiled drunkenly and put his hand on Shen’s shoulder.

“Shen. My friend,” he slurred.

“What’s going on Quon?” Shen asked, wasting little time. “What’s this all about?”

“How are you, my friend?”

“I’m okay. How are you?”

Quon shrugged and tapped his empty glass on the counter. The barman turned to top it up, but Shen put his hand over the rim of the glass, pulling it away.

“How about we keep things simple for the time being,” Shen said, and then told the barman to bring them a couple of Cokes. “So we’re both on the right level. What do you think?”

“On the right level. Sure,” Quon said, waving his hand. “I’m glad you made it out. Glad you could come.”

“Of course.”

Quon must be getting a divorce. That’s what it was. Quon and his wife were splitting and Shen was the only person he could call. That was his best guess. “How’s the wife?” he asked.

“The wife?” Quon replied. “Wouldn’t know. Haven’t seen her.”

Divorce. Shen was almost certain.

“Is she not at home?”

“Oh, yes, she’s at home. She’s all the way back there, at home. But how can I know with this place, hm? Tell me.”

“Well, maybe you should go home, Quon. Go home to Fang. You’ll feel better in the mor—”

“Go home? Go home! And how do you expect me to do that?”

“C’mon, I’ll get you a taxi.”

“Yes!” Quon laughed. “A taxi! Let’s get a taxi, all the way back home. What do you think the fare will be for a few billion kilometres? How much you got on you?”

Shen frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let me ask you something, Shen. Let me ask you this.” Quon leaned forward. His breath stank of alcohol and an empty stomach. “How’s your wife?”

“She’s fine.”

“Is she? Is she ab-so-lute-ly fine, Shen? Just the way you left her nine years ago?”

“Okay, that’s enough, Quon. Come on. We’ll talk about this in the morning, when you’re—”

“All right! If you won’t tell me about your wife, let me tell you about mine.”

“Fine. What about her?” Shen said, relaxing into his seat.

The Cokes arrived and Shen passed one of them to Quon and told him to drink it all quickly.

“Two weeks ago,” Quon began, “I woke up at six in the morning. Fang was up and in the kitchen, making something to eat. And you know what? She looked beautiful to me. Just beautiful. You know when a woman just glows? She was glowing. She made me my breakfast and it was the most delicious breakfast ever. Exactly what I like. When I was done, I grabbed my case and walked to the door. She came to see me off. She stood at the door in her pink and yellow pyjamas and she had this smile on her face. Empty. Like she was being controlled by a little man in her head who was making her smile against her will. She had a bit of ketchup on her thumb. She was licking it off as she waved goodbye. I got in the car, pulled out of the driveway, and she was still standing there. Waving and sucking her thumb.

“I was away for four or five hours—went to the gym, did some errands—and then I came back, right? Except, you know what, guess who was still there in the doorway when I pulled the car in? Fang. Standing in the doorway in her pink and yellow pyjamas, sucking her thumb, smiling like a mannequin.”

“Okay …”

“She’d been standing there the entire time I was gone, Shen. Standing in the doorway for five hours!”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know? Christ!” Quon slammed his glass on the counter. “I don’t know. But I do. I do know. Her hair was exactly the same as when I left. She was still in those goddamn pyjamas. She was still sucking her thumb, and not a single thing had changed in the house. The dishes were still all out. The egg shells were still on the counter. The bed was unmade. Nothing had been done. And I know my wife, Shen. You know my wife. That would never pass. No. Whoever or whatever was at the house, that was not my wife.”

Shen swigged his Coke. Maybe he should have ordered something harder, he thought. Quon was staring him down, waiting for a reaction.

“I don’t know, Quon,” Shen said, finally.

“Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know you do. Now. Do you want to tell me about your wife?”

Shen rubbed his hand around the glass, gathering the condensation on his fingers. “She’s younger,” he said finally. “She’s younger than I remember.”

“Younger. Ha! Yes. Not the woman you left behind, is she? Okay. How about this—what do you remember about us being up there?”

“Up where?”

“In Chang’e 11, Captain. What’s the last thing you remember about our mission?”

“The last thing? What do you mean?”

“Anything,” Quon said. “Do you really remember anything? Anything specific? Re-entry? Do you actually remember the day we landed?”

“Of course I do. It was only a couple of months ago.”

“Was it really? So you remember it. Great. Give me one memory of it. One story. Detail. Anything.”

Shen smiled. Quon was having him on. The entire conversation was some kind of weird wind-up. Of course he could remember it.

“Okay, well—” he began, playing along. “The day we landed. Let’s see. We … uh …” He paused. He trawled through his memories, but where there should have been facts and feelings about the event, there was nothing, a void. He could not even access the next available memory. A black hole had materialised in his head and it was sucking in the weak light of what he should have known.

“Forget the arrival,” Quon said. “What about this place? Home. Hell, let’s talk about this very bar. Do me a favour. Close your eyes.”

“Quon …”

“Close your eyes.”

Shen did as he was told.

“When you stepped into this bar, ten minutes ago, what did you notice first?” Quon asked.

“Um. The bar counter.”

“What else?”

“Two men playing pool.”

“Right. Go on.”

“And—I don’t know, Quon—you. Sitting on the stool.”

“Who was behind the bar?”

“A barman.”

“Barman. Okay. What was he doing?”

“Taking stock.”

“Hm. Open your eyes.”

Shen blinked hard. At first he could not tell what he was expected to see. As he looked around, however, he noticed certain details had changed. The barman was not a barman, but a young and beautiful woman. She was fidgeting at the till. The two men playing pool weren’t behind him as he was sure they had been a moment earlier; they were wearing expensive suits and halfway through a card game at a small table. There wasn’t even a pool table.

“What’s going on?” Shen asked. “How did—”

“What I saw when I came in here,” Quon said, “is probably what you’re seeing right now. Once you told me what you saw, I projected my environment onto you, as if your mind was a screen. Don’t ask me how.”

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s as if there’s something, someone maybe, trying to rectify the discrepancies between us. To balance our perceptions and create a synchronicity between our conscious minds. It’s failing. But it’s trying. Trying to make us believe the same lie.”

“What lie?”

“Captain Shen. You know what I think?” Quon asked. He ran his finger over the counter. “I think this isn’t home at all. It looks like home. It feels like home. But we’re not on earth. We haven’t returned from our mission. We’re still out there, and whatever, or wherever, this place is, it’s trying to make us think we’ve returned.”

“That’s ridiculous. No. We landed. Two months ago.”

Quon turned back to the bar. “No. No. These environments have been downloaded from our memories. Everything we see here we’ve seen before. Perhaps we’re being shown a world that we want to see. Our beautiful, ageless wives, for example. But there are glitches. This place is full of them. Look,” he held up his glass. It was a tumbler with a few last drips of whiskey sloshing at the bottom. “You ordered two Cokes. I wanted another whiskey. So mine’s a whiskey. Has been all along.”

Shen took a moment to process what he was being told. He watched as the stunning young lady behind the counter diced a lemon. She looked up at him, thinking he needed to be served, but he waved his hand gently, and she turned back to her task. “There must be an explanation for all of this,” he said.

“I’ve just given you one.”

“Have you spoken to the others?”

“The others? The crew. They’re not here.”

“Where are they?”

Quon shrugged and tapped his glass on the counter, signalling the barmaid to fill it up. He smacked his lips.

“Living in their own projections, I suppose. Stuck in their own lies. Who knows?”

The barmaid filled the glass and Quon beckoned her closer with his finger. She leaned over the counter and Quon whispered something in her ear. Once he had spoken, she headed back to her lemon. Shen thought it was odd, What secret could Quon have with a barmaid? but did not consider it for long. He was studying the bar for clues. The missing pool table. The card players.

His mind played over the events of the past two months—if it had been two months at all. Was it a dream? Was he dreaming right then? Had he really just walked back from his apartment or had he simply been in the same nowhere Quon had postulated, fabricating a past for himself as he went along?

He thought about his wife’s face. Her unnaturally young face. He thought about the extra rooms in the corridor. He thought about those wasted kids in the diner, eyeing him as he went by. He even thought about the taxi driver whose face he had not seen. Did the man even have a face, or was he only a back that could not be turned? There had been two black cue balls hanging from the driver’s rear-view mirror, but even though Shen knew he’d seen them, the mental image of what he’d really seen was different. In his mind, the totems hanging from the mirror were two playing cards, twisting on a string: a king of hearts and a joker.

Christ.

Where were they? Were they still in Chang’e 11? Was this a kind of simulation, and if so, who was controlling it? Who was controlling them? Shen rubbed his temples with his fingers and told himself to breathe. Quon’s drunk. This is a joke. A prank. We’re home. On earth. We returned.

“Okay …” Shen continued the discussion, pulling himself together. “All right. I’ll play along, and then how about you and I hit the road? If what you’re saying is true, and this is all some kind of a trick, where are we, Quon? And how do you suppose we get out?”

Quon smiled wryly and added, “I think I might know, Captain. After all, I’m the scientist. But as Heisenberg himself proposed, a good scientist must be completely removed from the equation in order to yield accurate results.”

As he completed his final statement, the barmaid lunged towards Quon with the knife in her hand, extended her arm over the counter, and slit his throat cleanly from side to side.