Ball Lightning(108)

Then I leaned back in my chair, shut my eyes, and sat thinking about absolutely nothing. Late every night I would sit for a while at the stillest moment of the day, when it seemed like I was the only one awake in the whole world.

My nose caught a hint of freshness.

It was an aroma absent any sweetness: comforting, slightly bitter, bringing to mind the first sunlight on green grass after a storm has passed, the last wisp of cloud in a clear blue sky, the fleeting chime in a deep mountain valley...?only more ethereal this time. By the time I noticed its existence, it had already disappeared, only to reappear once I turned my attention away from my nose.

Do you like this perfume?

Oh... don’t they stop you from wearing perfume in the army?

Sometimes it’s allowed.

“Is it you?” I asked softly, without opening my eyes.

There was no answer.

“I know it’s you,” I said, eyes still closed.

But there was still no answer, only a great stillness.

I opened my eyes with a jerk, and there, in the amethyst vase on the desk, was a blue rose. But no sooner had I seen it than it vanished, leaving the vase empty.

Every detail of the rose had been imprinted on my mind, so full of life, with such a cold aura.

I closed my eyes and opened them again, but the rose did not reappear. But I knew she was there, sitting in the amethyst vase.

“Who are you calling?” my wife asked sleepily, as she sat up in bed.

“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep,” I said gently. I got up and picked up the vase, then carefully filled it halfway with clean water and set it back on the table. Then I sat in front of it until morning.

My wife saw there was water in the vase and brought back a bouquet of flowers on her way home from work. I stopped her as she was about to put it in the vase.

“Don’t. There’s a flower in there.”

She looked at me strangely.

“It’s a blue rose.”

“Oh, the most expensive kind,” she said, laughing, clearly thinking I was joking. Then she reached out to put her flowers in again.

I grabbed the vase from her and returned it gently to the desk, then snatched the flowers out of her hands and tossed them in the wastebasket. “I said there’s a flower in there. What’s wrong with you?”

She stared at me for a moment, then said, “I know you’ve got a place of your own deep in your heart. I have one, too. It’s been so many years, after all....?You can keep it, but you shouldn’t bring it into our lives!”

“There really is a flower in that vase. A blue rose,” I stammered, in a much softer voice.

My wife ran out, covering her tears with her hand.

And so the invisible rose in the amethyst vase caused a fracture between Dai Lin and me.

“You’ve got to tell me what imaginary person put that imaginary rose in the vase, or I’m not going to be able to take it!” my wife said many times.

“It’s not imaginary. There really is a rose in the vase. A blue one,” I answered every time.

Eventually, when the rift between us was almost beyond being patched over, it was our son who saved our marriage. Early one morning, he woke up, yawned, and said, “Mom, that amethyst vase on the writing desk has a rose in it, a blue one. It’s pretty! But it’s gone as soon as you look at it.”

My wife looked at me in alarm. The first time we had argued about it, he hadn’t been born yet, and our later quarrels hadn’t been in front of him, so he couldn’t have known about the blue rose.

A few days later, my wife fell asleep at the desk while writing a paper late at night. When she awoke, she roused me with a nudge, and there was fear in her eyes. “I woke up just now and I smelled...?the scent of a rose. It came from that vase! But when I tried to smell it more closely, it disappeared. I mean it. There’s no mistake. It really was a rose scent. I’m not lying to you!”

“I know you’re not lying. There really is a rose there. A blue rose,” I said.

From then on, my wife never brought up the matter again, just left the vase there. Sometimes she would carefully wipe it, keeping it upright, as if she was afraid the rose inside would fall out. And on several occasions, she filled it with distilled water.

I never saw the blue rose again, but it was enough to know it was there. Sometimes in the still of the night I would move the amethyst vase to the window, then stand with my back to it. On these occasions, I could always smell that ethereal aroma, and I knew the rose was there. With my heart’s eye I could clearly see every detail, I could caress every petal, I could watch it sway slightly in the night breeze from the window....

It was a flower I could only see with my heart.

But I still held out the hope of getting another glimpse of that blue rose in my lifetime. Ding Yi said that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, death is the process of transitioning from a strong observer to a weak observer, and then to a non-observer. When I become a weak observer, the rose’s probability cloud will collapse to a destroyed state more slowly, giving me the hope of seeing it again.

When I come to death’s door and open my eyes for the final time, all of my intellect and memories will be lost into the abyss of the past, and I will return to the pure feeling and fantasies of childhood. At that moment, I’m sure the quantum rose will smile at me.