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“Did I cause trouble for you?” I asked.

“No. The situation's complicated. Only a few core members went to the finger-talking gathering just now. We've had some internal disagreements.” At the end of the sentence, her finger tapped out a few hesitant ellipses.

“About what?”

“About whether to do something stupid.” She drew two wavy lines under “stupid.”

“I don't understand,” I wrote honestly.

“If you're willing to listen, I can tell you how the finger-talking gathering came to be, how we're organized, the struggles between the factions, and our ultimate goal.” She wrote it in one long sentence.

“I don't want to know,” I replied. “I don't want to turn these interesting conversations into politics.”

“You don't understand.” She drew a greater-than sign, a sigh. I realized that she expressed even the most basic emotions through writing. “You must have noticed how the Internet, TV, books have lost any semblance of intelligence.”

“Yes!” I felt a rush of excitement. “I don't know why, but every topic worth arguing over has disappeared. All that's left is pointless bullshit. I've tried tossing provocative topics out in discussion more than once, but no one would reply. Everyone's more interested in sashimi and earthworms. I noticed it years ago, but no one believed me. The doctor gave me pills to get rid of the hallucination. But I know this isn't a hallucination!”

“It's not just these. Conversations with friends and the things you see on the street are becoming as bland as the Internet and the media.”

“How do you know?” I nearly stood.

“It's all a conspiracy.” She pressed hard writing this, hard enough to hurt.

“A conspiracy? Like the moon landing thing?”

“Like Watergate.” Her writing grew agitated, harder to decipher.

“I think you need to tell me everything.”

“Then we'll start with politics.”

“Hold on . . . when's the next gathering? Can I join?”

“This is what we're arguing about. Those in support of action think we should hold our next gathering in a public place, like the city square. We shouldn't keep running and hiding. We should show what we believe in, no compromises,” she told me.

“I'm guessing that the police don't like you guys very much.” I once again recalled the first time I saw her, chased by two panting cops.

“They don't have anything on the organization as a whole. It's just some individual members who have criminal records, especially the activists,” she answered frankly.

“You have a criminal record?” I asked, curious.

“It's a long story.” She was unwilling to say anything more.

I worked up my courage and asked the question at last. “What's your name?”

Her finger stilled. I tried to scrutinize her face under the hood, but the hoodie concealed her face entirely. It even hid any sex characteristics. I suddenly realized that my only evidence that she was female was her slender fingers. She could just as easily be a young man, I thought, though my heart utterly rejected the idea. I wanted her to be a woman like my big sister, flaxen-haired and soft-voiced and a little mischievous, freckles scattered over the bridge of her nose. The sort of woman I'd been seeking all my life.

“You'll know it in time,” she said eventually, avoiding my question.

“Actually, I'm more curious about” —the exquisite sensation of my left finger on her right palm was interrupted by the sudden howl of a police siren approaching rapidly. She straightened, alert, and pulled her hood lower. “I'm leaving now,” she wrote rapidly. “If you want, be there tomorrow in the city square at 6 a.m. Remember, this is your choice. This is your chance to change the world, or more likely, regret it to the end of your days. Either way, don't blame anyone else, especially not me, for your own decision. And I might as well add, I think bald men are sexier.”

She squeezed my right hand with her delicate but strong fingers, got off the sofa, and vaulted out of the living room window. I hurried over to look down. She'd already climbed down nimbly from the fire escape and disappeared around the corner. I touched my balding head, somewhat dazed.

9

For a variety of reasons, I sank into a deep depression the year I was thirty-seven. The landlady persuaded me to go to her shrink, threatening that if I didn't get treatment, she'd kick my ass out of the apartment. I knew that she just didn't want me to OD and leave my corpse in one of her rooms, but I'm grateful to her all the same after the fact.

The man was a Swede with a beard like Freud's. “I'm not a psychologist,” he said, once we'd talked some. “I'm a psychiatrist. We don't consult here. We fix problems. You'll need to take medications if you don't want to dream every night of your sister's grave.”

“I'm not afraid of pills, doctor,” I replied. “As long as the insurance covers it. I'm not afraid of dreaming of the sister I love, either, even if she crawls out of the grave every time. I'm afraid of what's happening around me. Do you feel it, doctor? Tick-tock, tick-tock, like the second hand on a clock. Here, there, endlessly.”

The psychiatrist leaned over, full of interest. “Tell me what you feel.”

“Something's dying,” I said in a low voice, glancing around me. “Can't you smell it rotting? The commentary on the news, the newspaper columnists, the online forums, the spirit of freedom is dying. It's dying en masse like mosquitoes sprayed with DDT.”

“All I see is the advancement of society and democracy. Have you thought whether some paranoia-inducing mental disorder may be causing this suspicion toward everything, including the harmonious cultural atmosphere?” The psychiatrist leaned back, fingers interlaced.

“You were young once too, doctor. You once had the courage to question everything.” My voice rose anxiously. “Back then, when we didn't know who we'd become, but understood who we didn't want to become. When there were battles and heroes all around us.”

“I reminisce sometimes of my youth too. Everyone should. But we're all grown people now, with responsibilities toward our families, our society, even our civilization and our descendants. I suggest you take these pills regularly when you go home to get rid of your unreasonable fantasies. Find an undemanding job, fish on the weekends, take a vacation once a year. Find a nice girl when the time is right—we haven't discussed your sexual orientation yet, I realize, please don't take that the wrong way—and start a family.” The psychiatrist put on his glasses, flipped open his notebook, and cut my protests off with a hand before I could voice them. “Now, let's discuss the problems relating to your father and sister. Your childhood traumas had significant influence on my choices of medication. Is that fine with you?”

The treatment was effective. I gradually grew used to the tepid TV programs and online forums. I grew used to society being peaceful, simple, nice, indifferent. I grew used to seeing the shade of my father, and tried not to argue over things past. Then this person in a black hoodie barges into the monotony of my bachelor's life and hands me a choice, a choice whose meaning I don't understand. But I do know that finger-talking has brought me a sense of groundedness I haven't had in a long time, made the things I felt that slowly died off eight years ago return from the grave like beetles bursting from their underground cocoons in spring.

I don't know what “tomorrow in the city square at 6 a.m.” will signify. Normally, when I'm faced with a choice, I toss a coin. The answer naturally appears as the coin whirls through the air: Which side do you hope will land faceup? But this time, I don't toss a coin, because when I get off from work, leave the Social Welfare Building, I unthinkingly walk in the opposite direction from the subway station. Next to a spinning pole, I push open the glass door. I say to the fat man across from the mirror, “Hey.”

“Hey, long time no see.” The fat man waves me in. “Same as usual?”

“No.” I smile. “Shave me bald. The sexy kind of bald.”

10

I startle awake at 3:40 in the morning and can't sleep after that. I take a hot bath, change into my Steve Jobs hoodie and khaki pants, put on my sneakers, put in my earphones, and listen to the metal bands of olden days. At 5:00 exactly, I leave Roy a message, drink a cup of coffee, and leave my apartment. The sun hasn't risen yet. The early morning breeze caresses my freshly shaved scalp, cooling my feverish brain. I take the first subway that comes, unperturbed by the strange looks I get from the sparse fellow travelers. At 5:40, I arrive at the city square. I stand in the middle of the green. The streetlights are bright, and the morning mist is rising.

At 5:50, the streetlights go out. The first ray of dawn illuminates the thin mist. People are slowly gathering. Someone in a black hoodie takes my right hand, and I pick up the arm of the stranger next to me. “Good morning” spreads palm to palm. More and more people are appearing in the city square, silently forming themselves into a growing circle.

At 6:10, the ring stabilizes with more than a hundred people in it. The participants of the finger-talking gathering begin to rapidly transmit information. I close my eyes. A drop of dew falls from the brim of my hoodie.

The person to my right is an old gentleman, by his flabby skin and the refined construction of his sentences; the person on the left is a well-preserved lady with a plump, smooth palm and a large diamond ring on her finger. The topic arrives: “Compared to the gutless bands of today, what bands ought we to remember forever?”

“Metal. U2. And rock and roll, of course.” I immediately add my own opinion.

“The Velvet Underground.”

“Sex Pistols.”

“Green Day. Queen. Nirvana.”

“NOFX.”

“Rage against the Machine.”

“Anti-Flag.”

“Joy Division.”

“The Clash.”

“The Cranberries, of course.”

“Massive Attack.”

“Hang on, does dance music count? Add Pussycat Dolls, then.”

I grin knowingly. The second topic appears, then the third. I've missed this sort of easy, organic discussion, even if it's via a mode of information exchange out of a kids' game. The fourth and fifth topics appear. My fingertip and palm are hard at work, avoiding typos while trying to use as many abbreviations as possible. I think I'm slowly mastering the skill of finger-talking conversation. The sixth topic appears, followed by the seventh. This seems to be the bandwidth limit for finger-talking gatherings. The commentary appended to each topic steadily grows until everyone interested has finished speaking. The creator of the topic has the right and responsibility to end its transmission at a suitable time to make room for a new topic. The first and third topics have disappeared. The second topic, on the First Amendment, is still gaining comments. The creators of the other topics independently choose to stop transmitting. Only the second topic is left in the circle, and the participants come to an unspoken agreement to stop carrying the topic itself, transmitting the commentary only to save bandwidth.

It's an inefficient use of the network to transmit only one data packet at a time. Someone realizes this and starts a new topic in the lull. The network is occupied once again, but soon the data clogs up at one of the nodes.

A memory from my distant college years suddenly surfaces. “Let's look at a now-obsolete network topology structure,” the network systems professor had said behind the lectern, “the token ring network, invented by IBM in the seventies of the last century.” So the finger-talking gathering was really an unscientific token ring network reliant on the members' responsible behavior. I hurriedly finish sending the enormous data packet of the second topic and use the bit of free time to consider how the system might be improved.

A very brief message appears. It's uneconomical, I think, but its contents make me gape. “To the sexy bald guy: my name is Daisy.”

I can feel the serotonin forming in every one of my hundred billion neurons, the ATP sending my heart pounding furiously. Every living bit of me is jumping and hollering in victory. In the place of this message, I send out: “Hello, Daisy.”

The size of the second topic has slowed down the network so that it takes me ten minutes to receive the data from upstream. It's clear that someone's stripped down the commentary to the second topic to the essentials. After the compressed file is my topic “Hello, Daisy” and its legion comments. “We love you, Daisy.” “Our daisy blossom.” “Pretty lady.” Then “Hello, Uncle Baldy!”

I recall how I looked in the mirror before I left home: my skinny body, drooping cheeks, red nose, and comical bald head, my outdated sweatshirt. I look like a clown. I smile.

I'm writing my reply when a commotion ripples through the network. I open my eyes. The sun has long since risen, and the mist has disappeared without a trace. Every blade of grass in the city green sparkles with dew. The members of the finger-talking gathering have formed an irregular circle, linked hand in hand into a silent wall. Many people watch from a distance: morning joggers, commuters on their way to work, reporters, policemen. They look perplexedly at us, because we have no signs, no slogans, none of the characteristics they expect of a protest.

A police car is stopped at the edge of the green, its exhaust pipes billowing white smoke. The car doors open, and cops get out. I recognize their leader, the short policeman who interviewed me. He's still wearing the same apathetic expression and walking with the same careless swagger. He strokes his neat little mustache, considering us, then makes a beeline for me. “Good morning, sir.” He takes off his cap and presses it to his chest.

I look at him and don't say anything.

“I'm afraid you're all under arrest,” he says without energy. Six hulking black police vans glide silently into the city square. Riot police in full gear flood out, approaching us with batons and riot shields raised. Our onlookers don't react at all. No one shouts, no one moves, no one even looks in the direction of the neat marching phalanx of riot police.