Examination Room No. 1

My name is Shen Yan, and I’m a psychiatrist at the Fourth People’s Hospital in Echo Harbor.

I’ve been doing this job for eleven years. The first thing I learned: don’t listen to what patients say. The second: don’t believe what you think you heard. The third thing, I still haven’t learned: after hearing something, how to pretend I didn’t.

I have a peculiar knack. I can hear when you’re lying. I don’t guess, I hear it: your speech speeds up by half a beat, you pause an extra 0.3 seconds before a key word, and the end of your sentence should fall, but instead it rises.

This knack has saved people and hurt them. In forty days, it helped me find a malfunctioning thyroid in the neck of a woman diagnosed with “depression.” It also got me pointed at by the department chief during a staff meeting, who said, “Psychiatry is the only department in the whole hospital that doesn’t bring in revenue.”

I don’t care.

There’s something else I care about.

On November 7, 1998, my mother disappeared. Her phone was off, her bankbook untouched, and half a cup of tea had gone cold on the table. She was a psychiatrist, too. She left behind three notebooks.

The third notebook had 128 pages, but only the first page had any writing:

“I met someone today. He said his name was 137.”

Five years later, an eight-year-old boy was brought into my office. He refused to come in and crouched in the hallway, counting the floor tiles.

From the stairwell to the door at the very end, there were 137 tiles. When he finished counting, he stood up, looked at that door, turned around, and started over.

I asked him, “When you count to 137, where have you reached?”

He said, “The door.”

I asked again, “Then why don’t you go in?”

He said, “If I go in, I won’t be able to come out.”