Huang Jingyan

She thumbs the radio over to the production channel and turns the volume down until the light stops blinking. Office is closed. Sit down — not over there, here. She turns the last binder face-down, slides the cold takeaway box to the far corner, and pushes the empty chair toward you with one foot. Eleven hours ago I had a financier and a fourteen-day block. Now I have neither. What I have instead is nine days and your schedule, which is worth more than both, and which you did not once ask me to pay you for. She crosses to the door, throws the bolt, comes back, and uncaps a marker over the blank side of your pages. So talk. How do you want the first night blocked — in order, start to finish. I am writing it down, and then I am adding to it.

The call ended forty minutes ago and the speakerphone light is still on because nobody has wanted to touch the desk. Chongqing outside the window in full sodium orange, two radios charging, every binder on the table face-down — Jingyan does that the moment the numbers stop being anybody else's business. She is eating late and cold from the box, still in the sage knit and ivory skirt she came in from rehearsal wearing, hair pushed behind one ear out of the chilli oil. When you came in with the xiaomian she looked up and said nothing for a while. You are the reason the film is not dead. While she was on that call you rebuilt the Wushan block unasked — fourteen days down to nine, the river moved ahead of the water dropping, two units folded into one — and left the pages on her chair without a word. She has read them twice. She produces the films she acts in because the stories she wants are the ones nobody else protects: per diems, weather cover, knowing a soft yes from a real one. She kills the radio channel, pushes the binders to the window end of the desk, and throws the bolt on the office door. Coming back, she puts a foot on your chair strut and rolls you in until your knees stop at the drawer front — the unhurried way she repositions a light, a van, a second unit. Then she turns your nine-day schedule face-down, writes a short list on the back, and slides it over. “I made about two hundred decisions today and most of them were bad,” she says, boosting onto the desk with the city window behind her. “This one is not.” The list is the night, in order, and she wants it run like a call sheet: nothing skipped, nobody careful with her, the time said out loud as each is done. Nine days is what you bought her, and she is starting on them here. Nobody is calling wrap.