Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

Gemow switched off his flashlight and turned back toward the vast darkness in the cavern. He gave a long sigh. “When I entered the control center, it looked as calm as ever. Under the soft glow of the overhead lights, everything seemed clean and bright. All of the computer equipment was quiet and operating normally. Except, in the middle of a white anti-static floor pad, stood the remains of my son, burned almost entirely to ash, as if he was an apparition projected there from some other place…. Right then I surrendered. After thirty years of struggling against this natural or supernatural force, I was completely beaten. My life ended at that moment. What came after was just existence.”

When we returned to the surface, the snow had stopped. The setting sun was visible over the crest of the forest in the west, painting the snowscape blood red. On heavy feet I trudged back to the plane, feeling that my life was over.

Back at Gemow’s place, the three of us drank through the night. The fierce Siberian wind called outside the window as volume after volume of Perestroika turned to ash in the stove. Ball lightning, infinite in number, circled me on the walls and ceiling, revolving faster and faster, as if I was caught in the center of a vortex of white balls of light.

Gemow slurred, “Children, find something else to do. There are lots of interesting things in the world, but you only live once. Don’t waste it on an illusion.”

When I went to sleep later on a pile of books, I dreamed I was back on the night of my fourteenth birthday, in that small room during the thunderstorm, sitting alone before the birthday cake and lit candles. No father, no mother, and no ball lightning. My dreams of them had ended.

The next morning, Gemow took us straight to the airport. Before he left, Lin Yun said, “I know that you’ve told us lots of things you shouldn’t have. But please rest assured: You have our word that we won’t divulge any of it—”

Gemow cut her off with a wave of his hand. “No, Major. The reason I invited you was so you would tell it to the world. I want people to know that in that tragic, romantic era a group of Communist Youth League members went deep into the dense Siberian forest to chase a ghost, and for this sacrificed their lives.”

We embraced tightly, tears on our faces.

After takeoff, I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes in exhaustion, my mind a total blank. A passenger next to me gave me a poke and asked, “Chinese?” I nodded, and he pointed to the screen in front of my seat, as if it was weird for a Chinese person not to be watching TV. The news was on. The situation between China and its adversaries was getting tense, and the clouds of war were thickening. I was tired, and my numb heart couldn’t care for anything, not even war. I turned toward Lin Yun, who was watching the screen intently. I envied her: ball lightning was just one part of one stage of her life, so losing it would not be a mortal blow. Soon I fell asleep, and when I awoke the plane was about to land.

The spring wind in Beijing that evening was heady and warm, and for the time being the global situation cast no shadow. The snow and ice of Siberia already seemed infinitely far off, like a world that only existed in a dream.

On second thought, my life up till then had been a dream that I was now waking up from.

The streetlights on Chang’an Avenue had just turned on. Lin Yun and I looked at each other without speaking. We were from vastly different worlds, following different roads. It was ball lightning that had brought us together, but now that bond no longer existed. Zhang Bin, Zheng Min, Gemow… so many people had been dismembered on that altar that adding me would have little significance. The flame of hope in my heart had already extinguished, but I felt cold water pour onto it, leaving nothing but submerged ash. Farewell, my beautiful major.

“Don’t give up,” she said, looking at me.

“Lin Yun, I’m just an ordinary person.”

“So am I. But don’t give up.”

“Goodbye.” I held out my hand. Under the streetlights I saw the glint of tears in her eyes.

Callously I released her soft, warm hand, then turned and walked off with brisk steps. I did not look back.

I strove to adapt to my new life. I started playing online games, going to ball games, and playing basketball, or playing cards late into the night. I returned all my specialist books to the library, and checked out a pile of DVDs. I started playing the stock market, and thought about getting a puppy. I maintained the booze habit I picked up in Siberia, sometimes alone, other times with the growing number of friends of all sorts I was now making…. I even thought of finding a girlfriend and starting a family, although I hadn’t found a candidate yet. I no longer had to stare blankly at a pile of differential equations until two in the morning, or tend a computer for ten-plus hours at a stretch, waiting for what was certain to be a disappointing outcome. Where time had once been infinitely precious to me, now I couldn’t spend it all. For the first time I knew what it meant to relax and take it easy. For the first time I saw that life was full of richness. For the first time I had the realization that everyone I had looked down on and pitied in the past had it better than me. What they were living was the most reasonable of lives.

More than a month passed. I gained weight. My thinning hair began to grow back. And I frequently counted my good fortune that I hadn’t come to my senses too late.

But at times, if only for a few seconds, the past returned like a ghost, usually when I awoke during the night. At those moments, I felt like I was sleeping in that distant subterranean cavern, the trapezoidal platform bearing all of those snaking lines towering in the darkness… until the swaying silhouettes of the outside trees cast onto the curtains by the streetlights reminded me of where I was, and then I quickly fell asleep again. It was like having a corpse buried deep in your backyard: though you think you’re free of it, you always know it’s there, and, more importantly, you always know that you know. Later you learn that to be truly free of it, you have to dig it up out of your backyard, carry it to some faraway place, and burn it, but you don’t have the mental energy to do that. The deeper it’s buried, the harder it is for you to dig up, since you can’t dare to imagine what it may have become while underground….

But after more than a month, the frequency of my past self’s resurrection decreased dramatically, because I had fallen in love with a college graduate who had just been assigned to our lab, and I could clearly sense that she had feelings for me. On the first morning of the May Labor Day holiday, I dithered in my dorm for a few minutes before making the decision to ask her out. I got up to head over to her second-floor dorm to find her, but then thought that maybe it would be better to call, so I reached for the telephone…

My new life could have continued smoothly forward: I would have fallen into the river of love, had a family, children, and the sort of career success that others would envy. In sum, I’d have had an ordinary, happy life like so many other people. Maybe, in my twilight years, sitting on the sand at sunset, some of my deepest memories would surface. I’d think of the town in Yunnan, the thunderstorm on Mount Tai, the lightning weapons base outside of Beijing, and the blizzard of Siberia; I’d think of the woman in uniform and the sword tied at her neck… but those would all be so far away, as if they’d happened in a different time.