Ball Lightning

Lao Wang started into the story: “It was at the end of July, maybe a little after seven in the evening. Normally, it would still have been light, but that day the clouds were so thick that you couldn’t see anything without a lantern. The rain came in driving sheets, enough to smother you if you stood out in it! Flash after flash of lightning, with no pause between them—”

“Probably a thunderstorm at the head of a passing front,” Zhao Yu put in.

“I heard one crack of thunder. The lightning just before it was really bright, enough to almost blind me where I was sitting in my room. Then I heard a voice outside shouting that someone had been hurt, so I ran out to help. At that time, there were four people at the station conducting observations. It was one of them who had been struck. When I hauled the man into the room, one of his legs was smoking and the rain fizzled where it fell, but he was still fully conscious. And then the rolling lightning came in. It entered through the west window, but the window was closed at the time! The thing was about… about the size of this pancake, and red, blood red, so that it filled the whole room with red light. It drifted around the room, about this fast…” He lifted his glass and gestured in midair. “…floating this way and that. I thought I’d seen a ghost, and was so scared I couldn’t speak. But those science guys weren’t panicked. They just told us not to touch it. The thing floated for a while, up to the ceiling, and down across the bed—fortunately it didn’t touch anyone—and finally entered the chimney. Right as it got in, it exploded with a bang. All these years on the peak, and out of all the thunder I’ve heard, I don’t remember hearing anything that loud. It set my ears buzzing, and did something to my left ear so bad that I’m hard of hearing now. All of the lanterns in the room went out, and the lantern globes and the glass liners for the hot water bottles shattered and left burn marks on the bed. When we went outside afterward we found that the chimney had exploded!”

“Where did they come from, the four people doing the monitoring?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you still remember their names?”

“Hmm. It’s been so many years… I only remember the one who got hurt. I carried him down the mountain to the hospital with two other people from the station. He was very young, and must’ve still been a college student. One of his legs was burned to a crisp, and because Tai’an Hospital wasn’t all that great back then, he was transferred to Jinan. Geez, it must’ve made him lame. The guy was named Zhang, I think. Zhang… something… fu.”

Zhao Yu slammed his glass on the table. “Zhang Hefu?”

“Right, yes. That’s the name. I looked after him for a couple days at Tai’an Hospital, and after he left, he wrote a letter to thank me. I think it came from Beijing. Then we lost contact, and I don’t know where he is now.”

Zhao Yu said to Lao Wang, “He’s in Nanjing. He’s a professor at my old university.” He turned to me. “He was our advisor.”

“What?” My glass nearly dropped out of my hand.

“Zhang Bin used to go by that name, but he changed it during the Cultural Revolution because it sounded too much like Khrushchev.”

Zhao Yu and I sat for a long time without saying anything, until finally Lao Wang broke the silence: “It’s not really all that coincidental. You’re in the same field, after all. He was a fine young man, that one. With his legs hurting so bad he bit through his lips from the pain, he just lay in bed reading. I tried to get him to rest for a while, but he said that from then on, there was no time to waste, because his life had just acquired a purpose. He was going to study it, and he wanted to generate it.”

“Study and generate what?” I asked.

“Rolling lightning! The ball lightning you were talking about.”

Zhao Yu and I stared at each other.

Not noticing our expressions, Lao Wang continued, “He said that he would devote a lifetime to its study, and I could tell that what he had seen on the mountain peak had him fascinated. People are like that—they sometimes become fascinated with something without knowing it and are unable to get rid of it their entire life. Take me: twenty years ago I went out to get some wood for the cooking stove and pulled out a tree root. When I was about to toss it into the fire, I thought it looked a little bit like a tiger, and then after I polished it up and set it down, it really looked rather nice. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with root carving, and that’s the reason that I’ve stayed on the mountain, even when I retired.”

I noticed that Zhao Yu’s room did indeed have lots of root carvings of various sizes, which he told me were all Lao Wang’s pieces.

We did not speak of Zhang Bin after that. Although we were thinking about him, it was not something easily put into words.

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