Ball Lightning(35)
We followed Gemow to another side of the platform, which was covered in carved text. “These are the people who sacrificed themselves to Project 3141 over the course of three decades, and who lost their lives to the horrible working conditions. This is my wife, who died after long exposure to discharge radiation gave her a peculiar illness marked by skin ulcers. She died in terrible agony. A fair number of these people died of that condition. This is my son. He was killed by the final ball lightning the base produced, one of three people killed by the twenty-seven times ball lightning was produced here. The stuff can penetrate anything. No one can predict where or when it will release its energy. But we didn’t think that conducting these experiments was anything dangerous. Since the chances of producing it were so low, people gradually dropped their guard. And that’s when ball lightning would appear, causing a disaster. The final time it appeared, everyone at the test site was unharmed, but it passed through solid rock and incinerated my son in the central control room. He was a computer engineer at the base.”
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.
* Plans for the Sanmenxia Dam, a gravity dam on the Yellow River in Henan Province near the border with Shanxi Province, were drawn up in the mid-1950s with the help of Soviet engineers. Construction lasted from 1957 to 1960, and the reservoir began to silt up immediately afterward, causing flooding on the Wei River that required decades of renovation work to control.