Free Decoded by Mai Jia Page A

life; in particular he had never experienced mother-love. Everything that Mummy did for him – cooking him three meals a day, making his clothes, asking him if he was too hot or too cold – this was all new to him and he felt it deeply. As time went on and more and more things were done for him, he wasn’t able to deal with his emotions any more and found this way of expressing his gratitude. Of course, the way that he chose was more than a little melodramatic, but that is the kind of boy he was. If I may be allowed the benefit of hindsight, I think that nowadays we would say that Zhendi was autistic.
    I could cite lots of other examples of similar kinds of behaviour, and perhaps I will tell you about them later on. However right now we need to go back to the evening when he had hysterics, because the matter is not yet over . . .
    [To be continued]
    The following evening, again at suppertime, Jinzhen returned to the matter that had been under discussion the previous day. He said that Mr Auslander had lived through twenty-two leap years and hence it might appear that he had got his figures out by twenty-two days, but that in fact he was only wrong by twenty-one days. That seemed completely stupid! If you have lived through twenty-two leap years then that adds one day for every year – it should be twenty-two days. Why did he say that it was twenty-one? Everyone, including Mrs Lillie, thought that he must have gone off his head. But when Jinzhen explained what he meant, those present realized that he had a point.
    You see, Young Lillie had explained that leap years were introduced because in fact each year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds long, and thus every four years they add another 24 hours. But obviously it is not precisely 24 hours that needs making up, because that would require the earth to take 365 days and 6 hours to travel once around the sun. How much is the error introduced? Every year it is 11 minutes and 14 seconds, so in other words over the course of four years, an error of 44 minutes and 56 seconds is introduced. This means that in every leap year cycle, a certain amount of time is added: 44 minutes and 56 seconds. Mankind steals that time from the earth. Mr Auslander lived through twenty-two leap years, so for him, a total of 16 hours, 28 minutes and 32 seconds of non-existent time had been added to his life.
    However, as Jinzhen pointed out, according to the original figure Mr Auslander had lived for 32, 232 days, a number that he obtained not by working out how many days there were in eighty-eight years, but how many days there were in eighty-eight years plus 112 days. While it was perfectly true that when he was calculating the 112 extra days he ignored the existence of leap years, it is also a fact that a day is not precisely twenty-four hours long. In actual fact a day is twentyfour hours plus almost a minute long – over the course of 112 days that would add up to 6,421 seconds, or in other words one hour and forty-seven minutes. So you have to deduct that one hour and fortyseven minutes from the original figure of 16 hours, 28 minutes and 32 seconds, which gives you a new total of 14 hours, 41 minutes and 32 seconds. That gives you the real figure for the non-existent time added to Mr Auslander’s life by the modern calendar.
    Jinzhen went on to say that according to his information, Mr Auslander had been born at noon and he died at nine o’clock in the evening, so at the beginning and end of his life, there was at least ten hours of non-existent time being factored in, not to mention the 14 hours, 41 minutes and 32 seconds that he had accumulated during his lifetime. No matter how you worked it out, Mr Auslander had one whole day’s worth of non-existent time added to his lifespan. Jinzhen had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what a leap year meant. You could say that since the existence of leap years had put his calculation of the number of days that Mr Auslander