The prolog gives the reader critical information about part of the mystery of the plot. The major actors in the book do not know about these events. This might be a 'red herring' or a 'red red herring' subplot.
0. Prolog.
They met in a dark staircase, in the evening just past dusk, in one of the apartment towers near Donghua university in Shanghai. The stale smell of dinners past filled the air, just barely overwhelming the sulfurous smell from the coal smog.
The young man said in his most desperate voice, “I need to do well on the TOEFL to enter Harvard. My parents could not live with the shame if I fail.”
The foreigner coughed from the smog then quietly replied, in his strongly accented and not quite mastered Cantonese, “The money, you it have?” By his build, he was unmistakably a foreigner, despite his smog mask, dark glasses and hat pulled down over his eyes. Even though he wore clothes from the local department store.
“Five thousand dollars?”
“Six. Cash. Now.”
“Here.”
The foreigner counted it. “You're short. Not enough. More.”
“It's all we have, we'll pay you. I promise.”
“No. Not enough for Harvard.”
“UGA then?”
“OK.” The foreigner pocked the money. He then gave the young man a written sheet with his gloved hand. “This instructions is. Understand?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Now forget you saw me.” He left down the stairs and out into the deepening fug. He had long a series of appointments to keep that evening before catching his plane home.
Shen Yi carefully read the paper he bought. They contained detailed instructions on how to log into a site using a virtual tunnel through the 'Great Firewall of China'. He could hardly wait, and once home fired up his laptop and got started.
The most beautiful girl he ever saw was on the screen when he logged in. She looked very much Chinese, for an American. He wasn't expecting that. He sat there, agog at her, his jaw dropped with amazement. She began to speak, “Do you want to start with the English practice?”
He stammered, in Cantonese, “Do you speak Chinese?”
“A little,” she then continued in English, “I'm adopted and my parents insisted I learn my culture's language. You're here to learn English aren't you?”
“You're very beautiful,” Yi, continued this time in English. She blushed. “Thank you.” She looked down at a paper on her desk and asked him, “The first question is 'what is the difference between to and too?'”
“One means also. Can you give me your email address so we can talk later?”
The girl paused, “I'm not allowed to tell you that.” She wrote something on a sheet of paper and held it up in front of the camera. Yi hastily wrote down her address. She continued, “The second question is give me an example of using too.”
“I like know if you are a college scholar too.”
“Very good, but it would be better to say, 'I would like to know if you are a college student too'.”
“I would like to know if you are a college student too.”
“Great. And I would reply, 'I am, I am a student at Georgia State University'.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“Donghua. I want to graduate study in Georgia.”
“Good, but 'Donghua, I want to do graduate study in Georgia', is correct”
“Donghua, I want to do graduate study at Georgia State University.”
The girl blushed again, Yi was a fast worker. He seemed nice enough, but coming halfway around the world after a couple of minutes of an online chat was a bit excessive. “Don't be silly.”
“What's silly about it? What is your name?”
“Jane.”
“Jane I think I you love.”
“Now you are really being silly. The right way to say it is 'Jane I think I love you', which you can't yet. We've just met.”
“Jane I know I love you.”
1. Put Your Hand Up before You Die.
Spring semester found me back practicing academic physics. While it was not quite as spiritually rewarding as chasing down a network of serial killers, my sudden death was a lot less likely when I was standing in the front of a classroom blathering away. It was a fair swap, especially since Laura Brown and I had hooked up. Having a reason to live changes your outlook on life. During summer, class breaks, and on the occasional evening, I still worked with Arthur Ellis, the head and sole full-time detective for Argus detectives. If I kept at it, I'd have my two years employment as a private detective and could become a certified private investigator. Given the status of funding and the way this university ran, that was looking more and more attractive each day. I'd drawn the short straw in the class assignment lottery for spring semester and was teaching PHYS 1101, non-calculus physics. Or as we liked to call it 'physics for poets'. It allowed the non-mathematical types to satisfy a science requirement for graduation, but far more importantly than that it brought credit hours and the tuition dollars that came with them to the department budget.I'd finished lecturing a class of 50 freshmen and sophomores in Classroom South. They mostly sat there slumping in their seats almost as responsive as lumps of mud. Today's lot looked suitably glazed over, with their brains well cooked and at the limit of their endurance. While occasionally one would realize that this science stuff was interesting and worth the effort to learn it, there would be no such revelations today. One student in particular looked a bit more thoroughly glazed over than the rest. I told the class, “See you next time, and don't forget to at least try the homework.” which was followed by the bulk of them rising and running for the door. They were 'free at last'. The student who was particularly glazed over lifelessly dropped to the floor when he was jostled by the others. I ran to him, while someone screamed in the background. I shouted, “Call 911”, and watched as several students complied. One student ran up, “I know first aid, CPR. Can I help?”
“You bet. Start on CPR while I go and get the AED from the hall.”
I dashed out into the hall, then down it towards the center of the building where there were AED's mounted on the wall. The alarm on the AED holder was already sounding. Someone had just removed the device. Two heart attacks at the same time on the same day was not a foreseen event.
Racing back to the room, I found the student pumping away as hard as he could. He shouted at me, “Where is it?”
“Already in use. When you're ready I'll spell you.” For the next few minutes we alternated for a minute each at pumping on the student's chest. CPR is exhausting work and the two of us were nearly shot when the EMT's finally arrived. We'd been doing our best to match the beat of 'Stayin Alive' which happens to have the right tempo for CPR. Unfortunately it was more a case of 'Another One Bites the Dust' which also has the right tempo.
EMT's aren't allowed to declare a patient as dead, but it was pretty clear that after a few minutes of their hard work, there wasn't much hope for the student. As they were leaving I heard one say to the others, “Funny, that's the tenth one this week.” His friend replied, “Wonder what they're taking?”
It had been a while since GSU had a serious drug problem. Most of the students worked part time to pay for college and didn't have the time or inclination to spend it high. Those that had the time tended to favor beer.
2
That night at dinner Laura noticed I was distant. Ms. Laura Brown, former assistant DA for the city of Atlanta and now a rising star among the state prosecutors and I, decided to get married. As she now had full custody of her son, I was going to be an acting stepfather. It seemed wise to move in a bit ahead of time and let her 6 year old son Daniel get used to me. “Will, what happened?”
“Lost a student.”
“You don't usually get upset when one drops your class.”
“Hardy,” I laughed, “No, it wasn't that. He died from heart failure at the end of class.” At least that's when we found out about it. He could have been dead for a few minutes before without my noticing it. That thought only made it worse.
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “That's awful.”
“I didn't think my lectures were that boring.”
“I'm sure they're not.”
Danny had a different take on things. By age 6, he'd seen his parents divorced, then had his stepmother reject him when his father was put on trial for organizing an embezzlement ring with murderous consequences at the university research foundation. Mind you, his biological father had just doped Danny's stepmother preparatory to chopping her up for smoked ribs and was extending his family in several sideways directions at the time. So she wasn't completely unjustified in dumping Danny into Laura's lap. My relationship with Danny wasn't helped by the fact that it was my efforts that put his biological father in prison. We had our good days and our not so good days. This was one of the not so good days. I was getting the silent treatment until he spoke.
“They are too.”
It was going to be interesting living as a new family.
3
Next morning I text messaged my TA. We had to discuss what happened yesterday in class and figure out a plan to deal with it for the next lecture. He showed up at my office and we talked about how to handle the death in a respectable and professional manner. I vetoed the ideas of talking about the heart as a pump and measuring the electrical impulses from its muscles. It would have to be an emotional and forthright discussion about feelings.
Since neither of us was particularly skilled at social or emotional intelligence this was promising to be difficult and I was looking through the university website to see if there were counselors who could help when the undergraduate who helped me with CPR knocked on my door.
Even though he was one of the more alert ones, with 50, well now of 49 students I hadn't learned his name yet.
“Dr. Sharpe?”
“Hi, I'm sorry, I don't quite remember your name, but thank you for helping yesterday. It's a shame it didn't work.”
“Steve Jordan, well,” he paused, “we did our best. When I took CPR they warned us it didn't usually work.”
“Steve, I'm sure you've seen my TA and graduate student Tom.”
“Yo.”
“Anyway, the student who collapsed, did you know him?”
“Same scout troop. We were buddies.”
“I'm sorry. Did he have health problems?”
“No, we just did Philmont last summer. 100 miles in a week and a half at 8000 feet. Couldn't have gone if he had a weak heart.”
“He wasn't doing any drugs? Cocaine will sometimes do things like this.”
“Sam, no. He was a straight arrow. Wouldn't even drink a beer.”
“So nothing unusual?”
“Nah, he was even earning extra money by tutoring foreign students with their English. Great guy.”
“I'm sorry.”
“He'll be missed.”
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