The Explosion Chronicles (35 page)

On account of this tension between reality and history, Explosion’s old streets and the new city became divided into two distinct worlds.

The city’s east side, west side, and development zone extended along the river, where new buildings stretched out like a multicolored forest. The glass surface of the buildings made the temperature in the city center always several degrees warmer than in the suburbs. Meanwhile, in the old city area, where there was a street named Explosion Street, there was barely anyone at all apart from a handful of people who came for sightseeing. Even Mayor Kong Mingliang and the city’s richest resident, his brother Mingyao, rarely returned home to this street. It was as if they had already forgotten that they were originally from Explosion Street, and apart from New Year’s or their mother’s birthday, they almost never visited their former residence. They were all very busy as business took off. After Mingguang and his wife got divorced, Mingguang didn’t end up marrying Little Cui, and instead bought an apartment at his school and stayed there. He, too, forgot to return home. As a result, it was left to their mother to look after the household. She would cook for Minghui and wash his clothes, and have him walk to work every morning and then walk home every evening. Minghui continued this practice of walking to and from work until one day his elder brother asked the director of the city’s mental hospital to take Minghui in for an examination, whereupon their mother began running a fever that lasted for three days. To express his filial devotion, Minghui looked after his mother until she was able to emerge from her room. She stood in front of the table like a living corpse and stared for a long time at her husband’s photograph, then turned to Minghui and said,

“How old am I now? I should go find your father and keep him company.

“… I don’t want to live any longer. I should go find your father and keep him company.”

One morning three days later, the early summer sunlight was shining down on the courtyard, and the city’s buildings at the base of the mountain were shimmering like ripples in a pond. Their mother slept for a while; then she dressed herself in the sort of clothing one would give a corpse and wandered out of her room. The nanny was in the kitchen heating some milk for her. At this point, Minghui was about to go into work, but as he was washing up he discovered that after his mother recovered from her illness, she was no longer the same person she had been three days earlier, but rather now there was a thick death veil over her face. He didn’t know what she had endured during her illness, but she suddenly looked like someone who had died and come back to life. Her skin was dried up, her face was sallow and wrinkled, and she stood there like an old ghost cut out of gray and yellow paper. She stood in front of her husband’s ghostly photograph, then used her sleeve to wipe away the dust on the photograph’s glass frame. She mumbled to herself, “I’m going to go find you! … I’m going to go find you!” It was as if her husband were inside the glass stamping his feet as he waited anxiously for her.

When Minghui heard this, he froze.

“I just want to die.” His mother then heard a sound behind her and turned around. Looking at Minghui, she said, “Your father is over there stamping his feet and waiting for me.”

“Then I’ll stay home every day to keep you company.” Minghui added, “After all, I don’t want to go to work anymore.”

His mother stared at him without saying a word, as her eyes lit up.

“I’ll stay with you for the rest of our lives.” Minghui added, “I don’t want to work one more day at the bureau.”

When his mother heard this, her sallow complexion became a little rosier, and she began to look more like a living person. Then, the sunlight streaming into the room became as bright as a mirror. The sunlight shone in all directions, and even illuminated the corner behind the door, which had been shrouded in darkness for thousands of years. At first, the old spider behind the door could not adjust to the sudden brightness and stood motionless in the sunlight. But eventually, after it adjusted, the spider danced happily across its web, which bounced up and down like a trampoline. The old hen that walked in lay down beneath the spiderweb for a while, and left behind a nest with five blood-veined peacock eggs.

Just like that, Minghui decided not to go to work anymore, and not to serve any longer as bureau chief. When he went to discuss his decision to step down with his eldest brother, the latter simply said, “You should discuss this with your second brother.” When Minghui went to discuss his decision to step down with his second brother, Mingliang, he first had to make three appointments with his brother’s office manager, Cheng Qing, and only then could he meet with his own brother. When Mingliang heard Minghui’s decision, he was furious, saying, “You piece of shit. You’re the youngest bureau director in the entire city. Don’t you realize that?”

Mingliang added, “How many more days does our mother have to live? She has money and a nurse, so if we designate her a Mother of the Nation, we will have fulfilled our filial obligations.”

When Minghui went to discuss his decision to step down with Mingyao, he was able to meet with him very promptly. At the time, Mingyao was in a hidden gully several dozen
li
outside the city limits, where he had erected quite a few basic military buildings and had recruited countless retired soldiers and militiamen. He was training
them and paying them a monthly salary. They were wearing military uniforms, and every month they would perform a military parade on a specially constructed concrete training field. On the eastern side of the training field there was a reviewing platform, which had been constructed to conform to the contours of the mountain ridge. The parade ground was located in the gourd-shaped gully on the other side of which there were military barracks. This was the training field, and under the scorching sun of the eighth lunar month they had lit a fire inside the gully, and the rivulets of soldiers’ sweat gushing out of the gully converged in a ditch and then continued to flow out of the gully. Mingyao was wearing a military uniform and was standing on the review platform under a parasol, watching the troops march back and forth in front of him. The magnificent military music coursed through the troops’ feet and chests, like steam in a steam engine. After Minghui arrived, Mingyao brought those military exercises to an end. Minghui stood on the edge of the platform and watched as one squad after another passed by on the way to the barracks, as the troops’ chants caused the platform to tremble under his feet. The rhythmic sound of their footsteps resembled the excavation machines that could be heard throughout the city every night. After waiting for all of the troops to pass, Mingyao walked over and smiled at Minghui.

Minghui said, “I don’t want to be bureau chief anymore.”

Mingyao looked over at the final military company that had passed by him and shouted, “Hey, Third Company Commander, let’s post some sentries at the entrance to the gully. No one should be allowed to enter this training area without my express permission!”

Minghui said, “I want to stay home with our mother, but Second Brother won’t let me.”

Mingyao gazed intently at Minghui, then snorted. “Sooner or later, Second Brother will need to listen to me.”

“But you’re so busy.” Minghui looked at Mingyao and added, “I’m leaving, and won’t be eating here with you.”

Mingyao patted Minghui’s shoulder and said, “After I succeed, you’ll be able to become a general or even a commander if you want to.”

When Minghui emerged from his brother’s training gully, he stood on the empty mountain ridge and saw the mountains behind him, shimmering in the sunlight. A loud rumbling sound could be heard coming from his brother’s barracks, which were hidden in the gully, while in front of him, in the hazy city of Explosion, skyscrapers jutted into the sky, like a glimmering sheet of fog covering the earth. Standing between that sound and the bright buildings, Minghui suddenly realized that something was going to happen between his second and third brothers, and that it would be as monumental as an earthquake or a volcano. When he realized how huge this event would be, Minghui’s legs grew limp. He squatted on the mountain ridge, like an ant trapped under an elephant’s foot, as tears began to appear in the corners of his eyes.

II.

Minghui went to tell his sister-in-law Zhu Ying that he didn’t want to serve as bureau director anymore. Many people would be willing to sell their own wife and daughter for the chance to serve as a bureau director in a new city, but Minghui was emphatic that he definitely didn’t want to serve. After finding that he couldn’t discuss this momentous decision with his own brothers, he decided to go see his sister-in-law Zhu Ying. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen her for a long time, given that the last occasion must have been his nephew’s birthday party. He had bought his nephew a tree that could be made into a house and plants that could be used for food, together with colorful plastic eggs that could hatch into real birds that would
fly off into the sky. As Zhu Ying prepared a tableful of food, Minghui played with his nephew while calculating how many years it had been since Mingliang—after being appointed county mayor and city mayor—had last returned home. Upon calculating that it would take only forty minutes to walk back to the old Explosion streets from the city government building, and a mere ten minutes by car, Minghui was astonished that Mingliang, despite living in the same city, had gone for so many years without returning to see his own wife and son.

“Do you want me to go find him and bring him home?” Minghui asked Zhu Ying.

“He’ll be back,” Zhu Ying laughed. “And when he does return, not only will he kneel down to me, but if I choose to ignore him he will die at my feet.” Upon saying this, Zhu Ying looked outside, then turned back to Minghui. “That day is not far off. I promise you’ll live to see it.”

Minghui couldn’t really understand what Zhu Ying was saying, but he didn’t hear much anger or resentment in her voice. Instead, he heard a principled shrewdness, which convinced him that she was truly extraordinary. He felt that Zhu Ying’s smile was mysterious and inscrutable, so that it was impossible to glean anything useful from it. Originally Zhu Ying and Mingliang had been working side by side, equally determined to make Explosion prosperous. They had been determined to have Explosion—originally a small village that resembled a fallen fruit—become a village committee in charge of overseeing other natural villages. They had been determined to have Explosion be promoted to a town, and even a county. And now, it had in fact become a bustling metropolis. But after Zhu Ying got pregnant and gave Mingliang a son, she rarely went outside anymore and instead spent all of her time at home raising her son. In the end, she had been through a lot. She had given birth to this city, and what she had seen and experienced was in no way inferior
to her husband’s experiences. When Minghui went to discuss with her his decision to step down as bureau director, he also went to see his nephew, who was getting bigger by the day. Minghui first went to a department store to buy his nephew a gift, and got him a pear from an apple tree and a date from a persimmon tree, together with a cocoa tree imported from abroad. As long as the cocoa tree was exposed to sunlight, small cocoa beans would grow, and later you would be able to pick chocolate fruit directly from the tree and eat it. He bought a plastic horse, stable, and pasture, and if you took the white horse out to the pasture, its belly would expand and some green grass would disappear. After the horse had eaten its fill, it would return to the stable to sleep, and after a while it would give birth to a tiny foal. The foal would then grow up, eat grass, and give birth to yet another foal. After several days, your home would become a veritable farmyard, and you would become the farm owner.

When Minghui arrived at the front door of the building that was originally the village committee building—and which subsequently became an industry building and was now a nursery school—he saw that there were many parents dropping off their children. He stood in the doorway for a while, but when he didn’t see his sister-in-law and nephew, he proceeded on to his sister-in-law’s house. Mingliang had paid to have the industry building demolished and then hired a Danish architect to design the nursery. All of the nursery’s walls and ceilings were decorated with lively colors and pictures, to look like a Danish town. When Minghui walked past that town, he saw that the pigeons sitting there were also colorfully decorated in red and yellow. The real pigeons were just like fake ones, and the fake ones were just like real ones, but he found this mixing of reality and imitation to be completely unremarkable. He therefore continued to his sister-in-law’s house. Zhu Ying had built what at the time was Explosion’s most extravagant three-story house, though now, compared with all
of the modern buildings and imitation European villas, it appeared old and dilapidated. In the entranceway to the two-decade-old house, however, there was a bronze plaque that said
CITY HISTORICAL SITE
, as a result of which the house and courtyard appeared dignified and distinctive. Explosion’s original main street was now Explosion City’s old city street, and all of the bricks and trees were cultural relics. But among these cultural relics, the old Kong family house and Zhu Ying’s house were particularly prized, and years later they would be designated as museums and the former residences of local notables. Therefore, Zhu Ying continued living on this street—and just as her mother-in-law continued living in the old Kong family mansion, Zhu Ying similarly kept watch over the Zhu family home, which she had built with her own money.

Minghui rang the doorbell.

He rang the doorbell again.

Finally, someone arrived to open the door. When it swung open, he saw that a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl was standing there. She was wearing a translucent silk shirt and shorts that were so short that they reached only the top of her thighs. Minghui was startled by her white jade-like thighs, flirtatious features, and carefully painted eyebrows and lipstick. He stepped backward, thinking that he had come to the wrong house. But when the girl saw Minghui step back, she smiled at him and asked,