Chapter 96: Settled Accounts and Calibrations

Before the sky had fully lightened, Lin Chen was already awake. The coolness of the wooden bedboards crept up his back. He did not hurry to get up. He first moved his left foot. The swelling around his ankle had gone down a little, but the joint was like a rusted hinge, turning with a dull, sticky pain. He threw back the quilt, sat on the edge of the bed, and slipped on his rubber shoes. The thick soles turned the pain of touching the ground into a steady pressure. He pulled the ledger from under his pillow and opened it.

Balance: 3.2 yuan. Book purchase shortfall: 6.6 yuan. Photos and copying not included. Countdown: 4 days.

He closed the book and stood up. The water on the stove had already gone cold. His mother was not in the main room; from the inner room came his father's heavy coughing. He did not disturb anyone. He pushed open the door. The yellow dirt road outside the yard had been packed hard by the night dew. He headed toward town. He did not walk fast, but every step landed solidly. Twelve li of road—he was used to it. The wind poured through the mountain pass, carrying the dry smell of dead grass and raw earth. Each time his left foot came down, the pain climbed another notch up his calf. He shifted three parts of his weight onto his right foot and kept his breathing even. No running, no resting. Traveling was physical labor, but it was also an arithmetic problem.

At eight-thirty, the rolling shutter of the town's Xinhua Bookstore was raised halfway. He stood at the door and waited. When it was fully opened, he went in. The clerk behind the counter was sorting account books. He walked to the shelf for social science and technical titles, his fingers brushing over the spines. Fundamentals of Electronic Information Experiments. The price tag was stuck to the lower right corner of the back cover: 9.80 yuan. He pulled the book out and flipped to the copyright page. Second edition, 1998. The paper had yellowed, but the inside pages were intact. Carrying it to the counter, he asked, “Does this one have a discount?”

The clerk looked up at him and shook her head. “Sold at list price. It's a reference book for college interviews. No discount.”

Lin Chen nodded. He set the book back on the counter. “I'll come back for it this afternoon.”

He turned and left. The town was only just waking up. The loudspeaker at the supply and marketing cooperative was playing the morning news in fits and starts. He crossed the main street and turned into the cooperative's back yard. The warehouse door stood open. Inside were fertilizer sacks, crates of farm tools, and ledgers stacked half a man's height. An old accountant sat at a wooden table wearing reading glasses, his fingers flying over an abacus, his brows knotted tight. Lin Chen stood in the doorway and waited a minute.

The old accountant looked up. “Who are you looking for?”

“I'm here to help reconcile the accounts,” Lin Chen said.

“You know how to use an abacus?”

“No. But I'm quick at mental arithmetic. I can check the details.”

The old man sized him up. Mud on his trouser legs, a slight limp in his left foot, but a calm, steady look in his eyes. “End-of-month inventory. We're off by more than three thousand jin of urea, and it won't come out right. If you can do it, come over. Finish the work and I'll give you two yuan fifty. If you don't finish, not a cent.”

Lin Chen nodded. He walked to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

The ledgers lay open. Incoming stock slips on the left, outgoing slips on the right. Numbers packed the page. He picked up a pencil and started from the first line. No abacus, only columns of figures on scrap paper. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, carrying and borrowing. His fingers moved quickly. At first the old accountant watched him; later he lowered his head and went back to his own abacus. In the warehouse there was only the rustle of turning paper and the scratch of pencil across the page. By eleven-thirty, the first stack was checked. Lin Chen circled the discrepancies and pushed it in front of the old accountant. “These three outgoing slips have overlapping dates. They're actually the same batch of goods split into two invoices. Merge them, and the books balance.” The old accountant put on his glasses and checked line by line. He was silent for half a minute. Then he nodded. “Keep going.”

By two in the afternoon, he was on the second stack. Lin Chen's left foot had started to go numb. He stood up, shifted his weight to his right leg, and leaned against the wall for ten seconds. A faded workplace safety slogan was pasted there. He sat down again and continued. Three-forty. The last stack. The pencil point snapped three times. He sharpened it and wrote the final number. The old accountant closed the ledger, pulled two one-yuan notes and one fifty-cent note from the drawer, and pushed them over. “Count it.” Lin Chen did not count it. He slipped it into his inner pocket.

Balance: 5.7 yuan. Shortfall: 4.1 yuan.

He walked out of the cooperative. The sun was already slanting west. His shadow stretched long. He headed for the scrap collection station at the western end of town. The owner, a balding middle-aged man, was sitting by the scale smoking. Lin Chen pulled out two bundles of old things from his backpack: draft paper from before the provincial competition, used-up exercise books, and several battered middle-school physics reference books. He put them on the scale.

The owner pressed down on them. “The paper's too damp. Bad for the weight. One yuan twenty.”

Lin Chen did not bargain. “Fine.”

The man handed him a one-yuan note and two ten-cent notes.

Balance: 6.9 yuan. Shortfall: 2.9 yuan.

Still a little short. He stood at the street corner, watching bicycles and tractors passing by. The dismissal bell at the town middle school rang. Students poured out of the school gate. He remembered a private repair shop at the eastern end of town; the owner's son was in his third year of middle school this year, and his physics grades had long been at the bottom. He walked over. The shop was piled with radio casings, picture tubes, and loose resistors. The owner was soldering a circuit board. Lin Chen stopped in the doorway. “Uncle, I can tutor your kid in physics for two hours. Circuit analysis and mechanics problems. Two yuan fifty.”

The owner stopped the soldering iron and looked up. “How old are you?”

“Third year of high school.”

“If you can't teach him, you don't get paid.”

“If I can't teach him, I won't take a cent.”

The owner looked at him for several seconds, then shouted toward the back room. A thin boy came out, clutching a test paper. Lin Chen took it and scanned it once. The mistakes were concentrated in Ohm's law and force analysis. He pulled over a stool and sat down. He did not lecture; he only broke apart the problems. He reduced complex circuits into series and parallel parts, and split forces on an inclined plane into coordinate axes. At first the boy's eyes were blank; later his pencil began to move. Two hours later, the boy solved a difficult final problem on his own. The owner handed over two one-yuan notes and one fifty-cent note. “Take it.” Lin Chen accepted them.

Balance: 9.4 yuan. Shortfall: 0.4 yuan.

He walked back to the Xinhua Bookstore. The rolling shutter was already halfway down. He knocked. The clerk stuck her head out. “The book?”

“There's an unsold copy with a torn cover. Can you let it go for 9.4?”

The clerk frowned, turned back inside, and rummaged around. She came out with one. A corner was missing from the upper right of the cover, and the spine was creased. The inner pages were intact. Lin Chen opened it and confirmed it was the same edition. “This one.” He handed over 9.4 yuan. The clerk gave him sixty cents in change. He put the book in his backpack and pulled the zipper closed. The weight on his shoulder felt solid.

The road back to the village felt heavier than the one there. His left foot had already gone numb, leaving only a mechanical alternation of steps. When he pushed open the courtyard gate, it was fully dark. The light in the main room was on. His mother was ladling food by the stove. His father was tapping out his pipe on the threshold. Xiaoman was sprawled over the table drawing. Lin Chen set down his backpack. Sat down. Ate. Said nothing. After dinner, he returned to the inner room. He spread open Fundamentals of Electronic Information Experiments. The torn spot on the cover exposed the stitching beneath. He flipped to the table of contents.

Chapter 3: Spectrum Measurement. Chapter 5: Errors and Compensation.

He picked up a pen and drew a timeline in the blank space. Wednesday: verification of materials. Thursday: interview. The first mock exam was Wednesday morning. The two lines crossed on the same day. He would have to compress his science mock papers into late night and early morning, break his experiment review into fragments, and wedge them into the time spent on the road and the gaps after dinner.

He flipped to the appendix. Inside was a folded slip of paper. Not a bookmark, but notes from the previous owner. The handwriting was neat, written in blue fountain pen:

Note: The interview teachers will first ask why you walked here all the way from Qinghe, then press you on the single most specific step in your experiment. Don't recite stock phrases. Explain clearly how you ruled out temperature-drift error, and how you calculated that 0.4 point.

Lin Chen's fingers stopped on the page. This was not a standard answer. It was someone else's record of where they had stumbled. The county library did not have things like this. The school teachers would not break down the live questioning for him step by step either. That meant that before setting out, he had to compress that experimental review into a few hardest facts. Otherwise, once he actually sat down at the interview table, the first round of follow-up questions would choke him off.

He closed the book. Stood up. Walked to the window. The night was thick. The far ridgeline was blurred. He returned to the desk, opened the ledger, crossed out “buy book,” and wrote:

Balance: 0.6 yuan. New shortfall: photos and copying. Solution: go to the town photo studio for the cheapest one-inch photo; hand-copy the materials and photocopy only the key pages.

Under that, he added one more line: If the photo costs more than 1.5 yuan, reduce the number of photocopied pages first; do not touch the fare for the return trip. Only then did he pick up the pen and begin writing the checklist. His handwriting was steady. There was not a single unnecessary word.

Early the next morning, postman Old Zhao's bicycle bell rang three times at the village entrance. Not the usual rhythm. Express. Lin Chen pushed open the door. Old Zhao handed over a kraft envelope. The flap bore the official seal of County No. 1 High School. He tore it open. Inside was the final schedule for the first mock exam.

Time: Wednesday, 8:00 a.m. Location: County No. 1 High School lecture hall. Note: Competition students must bring a deferred-exam application signed by their homeroom teacher in order to reschedule to that afternoon's make-up exam. Otherwise, they will be marked absent.

Lin Chen stared at that line. Wednesday morning. The first mock exam officially began then. Provincial Polytechnic's materials verification was also Wednesday morning. The two places were one hundred and twenty kilometers apart. The slow train took three hours one way. He could not calculate a third path. Wind blew in from outside the courtyard, stirring the dust on the ground. He sat back down on the bench and spread a blank sheet of paper before him. On the left he wrote “Deferred-Exam Application,” on the right “Give Up the Interview.” The pen hovered over the page. A drop of ink fell and spread into a black dot. He closed his eyes. His breathing stayed even. Then he opened them, picked up the pen, and on a third sheet wrote: Dual-track advance, Plan B.