Chapter 9: Procedure

When Mian woke, Shouyi was already at the table with a sheet of paper and a very serious face.

The paper said PROCEDURE across the top, underlined twice.

Underneath it said nothing at all.

"You've been up all night," Mian said, from the cot.

"I was on duty."

"You've written a single word."

"It is a difficult word."

Mian sat up, scratching his head, and Shouyi's pen flew to the paper and began to write something fast and illegible.

"Rule one hundred and nineteen," Shouyi said to the page. "A tutor does not."

"A tutor does not what?"

"Does not. Anything. With a student."

"I'm not your student."

Shouyi looked up for the first time.

"I'm your accomplice," said Mian, climbing off the cot and walking over in his bare feet.

"It's in the treaty. Clause four. I teach you to breathe."

"Clause four concerns breathing."

"Breathing is a whole body sport."

"That is a bad argument."

"It's a lazy argument, which is my specialty."

He sat on the edge of the table, right on the sheet of paper.

Shouyi had to lift his pen to keep from writing on his leg.

They looked at each other.

"I do not know the procedure," Shouyi said, finally, in a rush, as if it were a confession of arson.

"I have never done any of it. I am thirty years old and I have never even looked it up properly."

"The library has no manual. I checked the index twice."

"You went to the library for this?"

"At midnight. In a hat."

Mian pressed his lips together very hard.

"I haven't either," he said. "Never. I was mostly napping. Everyone I liked, I liked in a sort of, you know, general way."

"And me?"

"You're not general."

Shouyi put the pen down.

His ears had gone red again, which Mian was beginning to think of as the best part of the morning.

"Then we have no idea what we are doing," said Shouyi.