Lahat ng Kabanata ng Perfect Blind: Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

His name was Mr. Chen. Forty-two. Cashier at a supermarket on Huaihai Road. Lane three, always lane three, because lane three faced the wall and the wall didn't play music.I found him on a Tuesday. 11 AM. The store was quiet. He scanned items without looking at them—milk, bread, eggs—hands moving in a rhythm he didn't notice. Four beats. Rest. Four beats. Rest.I put my groceries on the belt.He looked up. Looked back down. "Membership card?""No."He scanned. Beeped. Four beats on the conveyor edge while he waited for the total."You're doing it again," I said.He stopped. "Doing what?""Your left hand. Four-four time."He looked at his hand like it belonged to someone else. Flat on the belt. Still now."I don't know what you mean.""You studied piano until you were nineteen," I said. "Then cello. Then composition. You taught music theory for eleven years at Jianye Middle School." I kept my voice low. The customer behind me was on her phone, not listening. "Then you met a therapist

His name was Lin Bo. Forty years old. Pharmaceutical sales rep for a mid-sized drug company, covering cardiology and pediatrics at hospitals across the district.I found him outside the Children's Hospital at two in the afternoon. He'd just come through the front doors—suit, briefcase, a stack of product brochures in one hand, the particular smile of someone who spent their days being professionally ready to seem pleased.He looked at me and kept smiling and asked which hospital's procurement department I was from."I'm not from procurement," I said. "I know Jiang Lin."The smile stayed. But his eyes closed like a window being shut."You have the wrong person," he said. "I don't know that name.""You do," I said. "Five years ago you were a resident in the pediatric ward of this hospital. One of your patients was a seven-year-old girl with leukemia. She was admitted for four months. Every rounds you'd stay ten extra minutes at her bedside telling her stories. Her mother brought you a c

The face was older. Softer. But the eyes—the gray, the calculation, the way they tracked me like I was a mirror she needed to break or steal—were Lin’s."Yan," she said. Not a question. She’d been waiting.I didn’t move. Hand on the doorframe, ready to run, ready to push, ready to do nothing. My heart was a drum in my throat, loud enough that she must have heard it."You’re not Y-3," I said."No," she stepped back, letting the door open wider. "I’m not. Come in. Or don’t. But if you want to know where she is—where *I* am—you’ll need to step over the threshold."The apartment smelled wrong. Not like Lin’s perfume, not like the hospital basement. Like rosin. Like violin strings. Like a music conservatory I’d once visited with Chen when we were hunting a forger who specialized in antique instruments.I stepped in.She closed the door. Locked it. The click was final."Sit," she gestured to a chair. Not a couch. A chair. Straight back, hard, facing a window. Interrogation setup. Or therapy

The train took four hours. North. Cold.I sat by the window. Watched the city turn to suburbs, suburbs to fields, fields to nothing. Gray sky. Gray earth. No line between them.The notebook was heavy in my bag. Y-7, Y-6, Y-5, Y-4. Margaret. Y-0.And now, Y-1. Or Lin. Or whatever was left.I didn't sleep. Didn't read. Just watched the gray. Remembered the video. Lin on this beach, winter, saying goodbye. Or saying something else. Something I hadn't understood then.*I'm going to stop being Lin.*That's what she said. But what if she meant it literally? What if she was already fragmenting, already becoming the copies, and that video was the last moment she was whole?The train stopped. Small station. One platform. No taxi. I walked.Thirty minutes on a road that became a path that became sand. The beach was wide, flat, empty. No tourists in October. No one.I saw the building first. "Seaview Care Facility." The sign from the video. Faded. Peeling.Then I saw her.Sitting on a bench. Fac

Room 218 was empty except for one thing: a child's desk. Pink. Plastic. The kind with a lift-top lid and a compartment inside for pencils and secrets.I sat on the small chair. Knees up. Ridiculous. But I didn't move to the floor. The desk was the point. The size was the point.Opened the lid.Inside: a notebook. Spiral-bound. Hello Kitty on the cover. Faded. Taped at the corners where it had torn.I opened to the first page.*September 3. Mom died today. I didn't cry. Dad cried. The doctors cried. I watched. I wrote: 3:15 pm, doctor said "I'm sorry." 3:16 pm, dad fell down. 3:20 pm, nurse gave him a pill. 3:45 pm, dad slept. I sat in the hall. 6:30 pm, aunt came. 7:00 pm, we went home. I didn't cry. I don't know how.*Next page.*September 4. Dad won't get up. I made cereal. He didn't eat. I watched him not eat. 8:00 am to 12:00 pm. He didn't move. I wrote it down. If I write everything, maybe I'll understand why she's gone. Why I'm not sad. Why I want to watch instead of be watched.