Ball Lightning

A security officer carried over a wooden crate that had once held experimental equipment, and General Lin sat down on it slowly. He did seem exhausted. Perhaps for the first time in his long military career, he let his exhaustion show.

Lin Yun nodded at Colonel Xu and Ding Yi in greeting, and gave a familiar smile. Then she said to the guard, “I’m unarmed.”

General Lin waved at the guard, who lowered the assault rifle, but kept a finger next to the trigger.

“I really didn’t imagine that macro-fusion would have so much force, Dad,” Lin Yun said.

“You’ve rendered a third of the country defenseless.”

“Yes, Dad,” she said, lowering her head.

“Xiao Yun, I don’t want to criticize you. It’s too late for that. This is the end of everything. The only thought in my mind the past two days has been: Why did you take this step?”

Lin Yun looked at her father, and said, “Dad, we came here together.”

General Lin nodded heavily. “Yes, child. We came here together, and what a long road it’s been. Perhaps it began with your mother’s sacrifice.” The general squinted at the blue sky and clouds in the mirror, as if staring at past time.

“Yes, I remember that night. It was the Mid-Autumn Festival. A Saturday. I was the only one left behind out of all the kids in the military kindergarten. I sat on a stool in the compound, clutching a mooncake an auntie had given me, but instead of looking up at the moon, I was staring at the gate. She said, ‘Poor Yunyun, your dad’s with the troops and can’t come back to pick you up. You’ll sleep at the kindergarten tonight.’ I said, ‘My dad never comes to pick me up. My mom does.’ She said, ‘Your mom’s not here. She gave her life in the south. She won’t be coming to pick you up anymore, Yunyun.’ I knew that already, but now the dream I had tended for a month was completely dead. The big kindergarten gate often appeared before me in my waking hours and my dreams. The difference was that, in my dreams, Mom always came through the gate, but when I was awake, it remained empty…. That Mid-Autumn Festival night was a turning point in my life. My lonely melancholy turned all at once to hatred, hatred for the people who had taken Mom’s life, making her leave me alone in the kindergarten even on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival.”

General Lin said, “I came to get you a week later. You were always holding a little matchbox with two bees inside. The women were afraid you’d get stung, and wanted to take the matchbox from you, but you cried and howled and wouldn’t give it to them. Your ferocity frightened them.”

Lin Yun said, “I told you that I wanted to train those bees so they’d sting the enemy, like they’d stung Mom. I proudly described to you all my ideas for killing the enemy… like how I knew that pigs liked to eat, so we should put lots and lots of pigs where the enemy was living and let the pigs eat all of their provisions so the men would starve to death. I thought a small speaker placed outside the enemy’s homes could produce an eerie sound at night to frighten them to death…. I constantly came up with ideas like these. It became a fascinating thought exercise for me that amused me to no end.”

“I was alarmed to see that in my daughter.”

“Yes, Dad. After I finished telling you my ideas, you looked at me in silence for a while, then took out two photos from a briefcase. Two identical photos, except that the corner of one was singed, and the other had brown marks on it that I later learned were blood. They were photos of a family of three. Both parents were military officers, but their uniforms were different from yours, Dad, and they wore epaulets that you and the others didn’t have back then. The girl was around my age and pretty, her pale skin a little pink, like fine porcelain. Growing up in the north, I had never seen skin like that. Her hair was so black and so long, down to her waist. So cute. Her mother was pretty, too, and her father was so handsome that I envied the entire family. But you told me that they were enemy officers who had been killed by our artillery fire, and the photos had been recovered from their bodies when the battlefield had been swept. Now the pretty kid in the photographs didn’t have a mom or dad anymore.”

General Lin said, “I also told you that the people who killed your mom weren’t bad. They did it because they were soldiers and had to carry out their duty to the fullest. Like your father the soldier, who also had to carry out his duty to kill the enemy on the battlefield.”

“I remember that, Dad. Of course I remember. You need to understand that it was the 1980s. The way you educated me was pretty alternative and unrecognized back then. If it had gotten out, it would have spelled the end of your political career. You wanted to dig out the seed of my hatred to keep it from germinating. That showed me how much you loved me, and I’m still grateful for that.”

“But it didn’t help,” General Lin said, with a sigh.