by Cixin Liu
My parents had long since departed, and It occupied every corner of my mind.
But what happened next complicated my simple world.
Strange Phenomena I
The summer after my sophomore year I took a trip back home to rent out the old place so I could afford my future tuition.
It was already dark when I arrived, so I had to feel around to turn the lock and make my way in. Turning on the light revealed a familiar scene. The table that had held a birthday cake during the night of the thunderstorm was still there, with three chairs still sitting around it, as if I had left just yesterday. Exhausted, I sat down on the sofa, and as I took stock of my home, I felt that something was not right. The feeling was indistinct at first, but as it gradually took shape like a submerged reef coming into view during a foggy cruise, I could not avoid it.
At last I discovered the source: it was as if I had left just yesterday.
I inspected the table: there was a thin layer of dust, a little too thin for the two years I had been away.
I went to the bathroom to wash the dirt and sweat off my face. When I turned on the light, I could see myself clearly in the mirror. Too clearly. The mirror should not have been that clean. I distinctly remembered going away with my parents during one summer break when I was in elementary school, and although we were only gone a month, when we came back, I could draw a stick figure in the dust on the mirror. Now, when I made a few strokes on the mirror with my finger, nothing appeared.
I turned on the faucet. After two years, the water from the iron tap should have been rusty, but what flowed out was perfectly clear.
I went back to the living room after washing my face and noticed something else: Two years ago, just as I was about to leave, but before I shut the door, I looked over the entire room on the off-chance that I had forgotten something and had noticed a glass sitting on the table. I thought about turning it upside down so it would not collect dust, but with my luggage in hand it would have taken too much effort to go back, so I dropped the idea. I distinctly remembered that detail.
But now, the glass was turned upside down on the table!
Just then, the neighbors came over to see why the lights were on. They greeted me with the sort of kind words one uses with an orphan who has gone off to college, promising that they would take care of renting the place and, if I could not come back after graduation, help me get a good price for it.
“The environment seems to have improved quite a bit since I left,” I said casually, as talk turned to how things had changed over the past two years.
“Improved? Get your eyes checked! That power plant over by the distillery just started up last year, and now there’s twice as much dust as when you left! Ha! Are things improving anywhere these days?”
I glanced at the table and its thin layer of dust and said nothing. But when I saw them off, I could not help asking whether any of them had a key to the house. They looked at each other in surprise and said they most certainly did not. I believed them, because there had been a total of five keys, three of which still worked. When I left two years ago I took all three: one I had with me now, and two others were far away in my college dorm room.
After the neighbors left, I inspected the windows, all of them tightly sealed with no evidence of break-ins.
The remaining two keys had been carried by my parents. But on that night, they had melted. I will never forget how I’d found those two misshapen lumps of metal among my parents’ ashes. Those keys, melted and resolidified, were sitting in my dormitory a thousand kilometers away, as mementos of that fantastic energy.
I sat for a while before starting to get together the things that would be stored or taken back with me once the house was rented. I first packed my father’s watercolors, one of the few things in the room that I wanted to save. I took down the ones hanging on the walls first, then got others out of a cabinet and packed as many as I could find into a cardboard box. Then I noticed one more painting. It was still lying on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, facedown, which was why I had missed it. When I glanced at it before putting it into the box, it seized my whole attention.
It was a landscape painting of the scenery visible from the door to our home. The surrounding scenery was dull: a few gray four-story walk-ups and several rows of poplars, lifeless from the dust covering them....
As a third-rate amateur painter, my father was lazy. Rarely going out to sketch from the real world, he was content to paint the muddy scenes that surrounded him. He said that there were no flat colors, only mediocre painters. That was the sort of painter he was, but these flat scenes, which acquired another level of woodenness as interpreted through his artless brush, actually managed to capture everyday life in this dingy northern city. The painting I held in my hand was like so many already in the box, with nothing in particular to recommend it.
But I had noticed something: a water tower that was a little more brightly colored than the old buildings surrounding it, standing tall like a morning glory. Nothing special, really, because there was indeed a water tower outside. I looked out the window at the towering structure silhouetted against the lights of the city.
Except, the water tower had not been completed until after I went off to college. When I left two years ago, it had been half-finished and covered in scaffolding.
I trembled, and the painting slipped out of my hand. A breath of cold air seemed to blow through the house on this midsummer night.
I crammed the painting into the box, closed the lid tightly, and then started packing other things. I tried to focus my attention on the task at hand, but my mind was a needle suspended on a filament, and the box was a strong magnet. With effort, I could redirect the needle, but once I let up, it would swing back in that direction.
It was raining. The raindrops tapped softly against the windowpane, but the sound seemed to be coming from the box....
Finally, when I could not stand it any longer, I raced to the box, opened it, took out the painting, and carried it to the bathroom, taking care to hold it facedown. Then I took out a lighter and lit one corner. When about a third of the painting had burned up, I gave in and flipped it over. The water tower was even more lifelike than before, and seemed to poke out of the surface. I watched as it was consumed by flames, which turned strange, seductive colors as the watercolors burned. I dropped the last bit of the painting into the sink and watched it burn out, then turned on the faucet and rinsed the ashes down the drain.
When I turned off the faucet, my eyes were drawn to something on the edge of the sink that I had not noticed when I’d washed my face.
A few strands of hair. Long hair.
They were white hairs, some completely white, so they blended in with the sink, and others half-white, the black portions catching my attention. Definitely not hair that I had left behind two years before. My hair had never been that long, and I had never had any white hair at all. Carefully, I lifted up one long, half-black, half-white strand.
... pluck one, and seven will grow back...
I tossed the hair aside like it burned my hand. As the strand drifted gently downward, it left a trail: a trail made up of the fleeting images of many strands, like a momentary persistence of vision. It did not land beside the sink, but fell only partway before vanishing into thin air. I looked back at the other hairs on the sink: they, too, had vanished without a trace.
I ran my head under the faucet for a long while, then walked stiffly back to the living room, where I sat down on the sofa and listened to the rain outside. It had turned heavy, a storm without thunder or lightning. Rain pounded on the windows, sounding like a voice, or perhaps many people speaking softly, as if they were trying to remind me of something. As I listened, I started to imagine the meaning of the murmuring, which became more and more real as it was repeated:
There was lightning that night, there was lightning that night, there was lightning that night, there was lightning that night, there was lightning that night...
&n
bsp; Once again I sat in that house until dawn on a stormy night, and once again I numbly left home. I knew I was leaving something behind forever, and I knew I would never return.
Ball Lightning
Classes in atmospheric electricity started that semester, meaning I would finally have to face it.
The subject was taught by an assistant professor named Zhang Bin. He was about fifty, neither short nor tall, wore glasses that were neither thick nor thin, had a voice that was neither loud nor soft, and his lectures were neither great nor terrible. In sum, as average as a person could be, except for a slight limp in one leg, something you would not notice unless you paid close attention.
That afternoon after class, I was left alone in the lecture room with Zhang Bin, who was gathering his things at the podium and did not notice me. A late-autumn sunset sent its golden beams into the room, and a layer of golden leaves covered the windowsill. Ordinarily cold and detached, I suddenly realized that this was the season for poetry.
I got up and walked over to the podium. “Professor Zhang, I’d like to ask you a question completely unrelated to today’s lecture.”
He looked up at me for a moment before nodding and returning his attention to his things.
“It’s about ball lightning. What can you tell me about it?” I uttered the words that I had kept buried deep in my heart, never daring to speak aloud.
His hands ceased their activity. He looked up—not at me, but out the window at the setting sun, as if that were what I was referring to. “What do you want to know?” he asked after a few seconds.
“Everything,” I said.
Zhang Bin continued to look at the sun as its light bathed his face. It was still quite bright at that hour. Didn’t it hurt his eyes?
“The historical record, for example,” I prompted in more detail.
“In Europe, records exist from as early as the Middle Ages. In China, a relatively clear record was set down by Zhang Juzheng in the Ming dynasty. But the first formal scientific discussion only occurred in 1837, and the scientific community didn’t accept it as a natural phenomenon until the last forty years.”
“Any theories about it?”
“There are many.” After this simple sentence, Zhang Bin was silent. He turned away from the setting sun, but did not resume getting his things together. He seemed deep in thought.
“What are the traditional theories?”
“That it’s a vortex of high-temperature plasma whose rapid internal rotation exerts a force in equilibrium with outside atmospheric pressure and thus can maintain stability for a relatively long time.”
“And?”
“Others believe that it’s a chemical reaction within a high-temperature gas mixture, by which it maintains energy equilibrium.”
“Can you tell me anything else?” Asking him questions was like trying to move a heavy grindstone that barely budged an inch with each push.
“There’s also the microwave-soliton theory, which says that ball lightning is caused by an atmospheric maser with a volume of several cubic meters.... A maser is like a much less powerful laser, which, inside a large volume of air, can produce a localized magnetic field as well as solitons, which then create visible ball lightning.”
“And the latest theories?”
“There are lots. For example, one by Abrahamson and Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has gained a fair amount of attention. Their theory says that ball lightning is primarily due to the oxidization of a filamentary network of silicon nanoparticles. There are many more. Some people even believe that it is a cold fusion reaction in the air.”
He paused, but then came out with more information: “In this country, there’s someone at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who has suggested an atmospheric plasma theory. It starts off with magnetic fluid dynamics equations and introduces a vector-soliton resonator model which, under appropriate boundary temperatures, is theoretically able to achieve a plasma vortex in the atmosphere—a fireball—and whose numerical analysis explains both the necessary and sufficient conditions for its existence.”
“And your opinion of this theory?”
He shook his head gently. “Proving the theory requires nothing more than producing ball lightning in the lab, but no one has succeeded yet.”
“Nationally, how many eyewitnesses have there been?”
“Quite a few. I’d say at least a thousand. The most famous was in 1998, when state television was shooting a documentary of the flood-fighting efforts on the Yangtze River and unwittingly recorded ball lightning on film.”
“One last question, Professor. In the atmospheric physics community, are there people who have personally witnessed ball lightning?”
Once again, he looked out the window at the setting sun. “Yes.”
“When?”
“In July 1962.”
“Where?”
“Yuhuang Peak on Mount Tai.”
“Do you know where that person is now?”
Zhang Bin shook his head, then raised his wrist and glanced at his watch: “You should head to the cafeteria for dinner.” Then he picked up his things and left the building.
I caught up to him and finally asked the question that had been in my mind all these years: “Professor Zhang, can you imagine a fireball-shaped object that can pass through walls, and can reduce a person to ashes instantaneously even though it doesn’t feel hot? There is a record of a sleeping couple reduced to ashes in their bed without a single scorch mark on their blanket! Can you imagine it entering a refrigerator and instantly turning all your frozen food cooked and piping hot without affecting the refrigerator’s operation? Can you imagine it burning your undershirt to a crisp without you feeling a thing? Can the theories you’ve mentioned explain all of this?”
“There’s no proof for any of those theories,” he said, without altering his stride.
“Then, if we leave the confines of atmospheric physics, do you think there is any explanation in the rest of physics, or even in all of science itself, for this phenomenon? Aren’t you even the least bit curious? Your reaction is even more shocking than seeing ball lightning itself!”
Zhang Bin stopped and turned to face me for the first time: “You’ve seen ball lightning?”
“...I was just speaking hypothetically.”
I could not reveal my deepest secret to this unfeeling person before me. Society was plagued by stoicism in the face of the profound mysteries of the natural world: its existence was the bane of science. If science had less of that sort of person, who knows, maybe humanity would have reached Alpha Centauri by now!
He said, “The field of atmospheric physics is very practical. Ball lightning is such a rare phenomenon that neither the IEC/TC-81 international standard for protection against lightning in structures nor China’s 1993 Standard for Protection of Structures Against Lightning dealt with it. So there’s really no point in devoting any effort to it.”
There was nothing I could say to a person like Zhang Bin, so I thanked him and left. And, truth be told, even admitting the existence of ball lightning was already a major step for him. Before the scientific community formally recognized its existence in 1963, all eyewitness accounts were judged hallucinations. One day that year, Roger Jennison, a professor of electronics at the University of Kent, personally witnessed ball lightning on an airplane departing New York in the form of a twenty-centimeter-wide fireball that passed through the wall separating the pilot’s cabin and the passenger cabin and down the aisle before disappearing through a wall.
That evening, I performed my first Google search for “ball lightning.” I was not particularly hopeful, but I ended up with more than forty thousand search results. For the first time since deciding to devote my entire life to this thing, I felt like the world was paying attention, too.
*
Another semester began, and then the sweltering summer arrived. For me, summer had an additional meaning: thundersto
rms would appear and bring me that much closer to It.
One day, out of the blue, Zhang Bin came looking for me. The class I had with him had concluded the previous semester, and I had practically forgotten him.
He said, “Chen, I’ve heard that your parents are gone and you’re in a tight spot financially. I’ve got a summer project that needs another assistant. Can you come?”
“What sort of project?” I asked him.
“It’s a parameter determination for anti-lightning equipment for a railroad being built in Yunnan Province. And there’s one additional goal: in the new national standards for lightning protection currently under deliberation, the plan is to replace the ground flash density of 0.015 from the previous standard with one determined according to individual local conditions. We’re doing the observations in Yunnan.”
I agreed to go. Although I was not particularly rich, I could still get by. I agreed because this was my first chance for real hands-on lightning research.
The task force consisted of about a dozen people divided into five teams distributed over a large area, with several hundred kilometers between them. The group I was in had three members apart from the driver and experimental assistants: myself, Zhang Bin, and a grad student named Zhao Yu. When we reached our zone, we roomed at the county-level meteorological station.
The weather was quite good the next morning, so we could start our first day of field work. As we were moving the instruments and equipment out to the car from the room we were using as temporary storage, I asked, “Professor Zhang, what are some good ways for exploring the internal structure of lightning?”
He peered at me intently for a moment, as if aware of what I was thinking. “Judging from the current needs of domestic engineering projects, research on the lightning structure is not a priority. The priority right now is large-scale statistical research.” Whenever I brought up anything even remotely related to ball lightning, he dodged the question. Evidently the man genuinely detested everything that lacked practical value.