Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

We pounded our fists against the walls of the iron chamber and yelled at the top of our lungs. Then we lay down and examined the floorboards. The already messy room became even more chaotic, but all our efforts were futile, and the sturdy, utterly flawless walls only increased our panic. We did this again and again until we were completely exhausted. The deputy squad leader was the first to stop, then the two of us gradually calmed down. Ma Zaihai grabbed at his short hair and sat dejectedly in the chair. I rested my head against the wall, brought it back, then smashed it savagely back down.

Any sense of order had now been lost. Could there really be ghosts in here? No one spoke. We could hear one another breathing heavily. And the atmosphere, well, our minds had all gone blank, so there was no atmosphere to speak of. Time passed little by little. Perhaps it was two hours, perhaps four. No one spoke a word. Now that the agitation had passed, exhaustion surged over us like an ocean tide. There came a long period of semiconsciousness, but I was far from asleep. In all my life I’d never felt weariness like this. As a geological prospector, there’d been numerous times I did not sleep for days, but I was always able to regulate my level of exhaustion. We were all born not long after the beginning of the War of Resistance. Even in childhood, we had to labor under conditions so arduous they would be difficult to imagine. Physical tiredness meant little to us, but this sort of total psychic fatigue was something else entirely.

Slowly, though, my mind did become more placid. I don’t know precisely how long it all lasted. I’d imagine that what brought me back was the chill that ran through my body once the cold sweat had dried. Or it could have been the hunger. I took a deep breath, turned off my flashlight, and looked around for a place to sit. How long since I’d last eaten, I wondered, and how long had I already been inside this chamber? Here there was neither night nor day. Everything had been thrown into disorder. In those days, watches were considered home appliances. Given that even the supply of lighters was restricted, you can imagine how much harder it was to acquire a watch. As my senses returned, I began to think deeply, almost as if forced. The details of the entire circumstance were released into my mind with no way for me to stop their advance. I later told Old Cat that it was only at this point that I really began to consider what was going on. You could say that the way I thought about things somehow opened up. I’ve always felt that the moderate professional success I’ve achieved since then was catalyzed by this very experience. Though it might seem incomprehensible to many, there were a lot of people like me in those days—simple and naive, our problem-solving methods unfailingly direct. This was probably because our news and information was severely limited. You can ask your parents to relate how simplistic the plots of our movies and model-theater performances were—persons good and bad could be clearly distinguished based solely on what they looked like. Back then we almost never considered issues of too great complexity. It was this immaturity on our parts, this belief that things should be simple, that allowed the Ten-Year Calamity (the Cultural Revolution) to be so destructive.

At first, my mind was filled entirely with scenes of Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu’s disappearance, all occurring beneath the swaying beam of a flashlight, until I felt dizzy. Then my mind began to move. Just how had it all happened? There had to be something unusual about this chamber that we were unaware of. In a deep recess thirty-six hundred feet underground, within a strange airtight chamber built into a ruined installation abandoned by the Japanese decades before—in a situation in which it was absolutely impossible to disappear—two very alive people were suddenly nowhere to be seen. Assuming they really were gone, then at some point during the several minutes when our attention slackened and we weren’t watching them, something must have occurred. But what?

I tried as hard as I could to recall anything that had felt even the slightest bit amiss. When Yuan Xile disappeared, it had been amid total darkness. All of our attention had been focused on finding a flashlight. We’d ignored any sounds that might have been occurring around us. Yuan Xile could have used that moment to do anything she wanted. When Chen Luohu disappeared, the room had been only half dark, but all of our attention had been focused on the opening to the air shaft. We were completely blind to anything happening behind us. Both times somebody disappeared, all our attention had been concentrated on a single spot. I sighed and a preposterous thought appeared in my mind. Was it possible that in here, as soon as you stopped thinking about someone, they would vanish?

This was truly absurd, but as soon as the thought occurred to me, my whole body suddenly went cold and I realized: I wasn’t paying attention to Ma Zaihai and the deputy squad leader! With a start I came back to reality, hurriedly twisting my head around, looking for the two of them. Darkness surrounded me. At some point, their flashlight beams had been extinguished, but I hadn’t noticed. A wave of panic rushed over me. I groaned involuntarily. I sank into a state of extreme, irrational fear. I was so scared that my entire body curled in on itself. I was unable to force a single breath into or out of my chest. I made myself scream out, though the barest sounds were all I could manage. There was no response. I truly was the only person left in that pitch-black room. I felt another splitting headache, as if my skull were bursting open. The brief calm I’d experienced disappeared at once. I cried out as loud as I could and switched my flashlight back on.

For the briefest moment, I genuinely believed that I was looking at an utterly empty room. I alone had been abandoned within these hellish ruins, trapped inside a secret pitch-black chamber, poisonous mist just beyond the door, and everyone who was with me had vanished like ghosts. A more awful plight could not be conceived. Had it truly been as bad as all that, I’m afraid I would have promptly gone mad. The difference between novels and socalled reality is that, while novels often go to extremes, in reality people are rarely forced into such desperate straits. As soon as I switched on my flashlight, I saw Ma Zaihai standing before me, having seemingly appeared out of thin air. His face was white as a dead man’s and he seemed to be groping around the wall for something. I yelled in fright as soon as I saw him. He immediately shrank back several feet. The beam of a second flashlight shot across the room and swept toward me. It was the deputy squad leader, standing in another corner of the iron chamber and watching us with a perplexed look on his face.

Though I relaxed a little, I was still furious. “What the hell were you doing?” I asked them. “Why did you turn off your flashlights and not say a word?”

Ma Zaihai had gone totally stiff. I had scared him half to death and he was speechless. The deputy squad leader stepped in and explained. He’d realized that when the other two disappeared, the iron chamber had been almost totally dark. He wondered if there wasn’t some sort of mechanism that turned on when all the lights were off. So he’d asked the two of us to turn off our flashlights and see what we could find. I’d turned mine off just as he’d said this, so he’d assumed I’d heard.

Seeing that the two of them were still here, I began to calm down. “I thought you two had disappeared as well,” I told them. The way their eyes widened said they’d had the same worries. Being regular soldiers, though, they were different from me. They had just taken their feelings, placed them in the back of their minds, and ignored them.