Wild Fire Bids Farewell To Summer Chapter 35
byAfter the Beginning of Spring 2
The canvas of the cot collapsed under the weight, forming a human-shaped indentation.Wei Zhiheng was lying on his side, his left hip pressed against the edge of the bed, and his ilium pressed against the iron pipe frame.There is a dull pain in the bone marrow cavity, deep inside, rising and twitching with the heartbeat.The morphine patch took effect on the lower back, and the coolness penetrated the skin, unable to suppress the pain in the bone seams.When he opened his eyes, his field of vision was completely black, and the retinal hemorrhage had completely swallowed up the sense of light. He couldn’t even see his fingers hovering in front of his eyes.
He is on the borderline between consciousness and coma.The right hand holds the limestone specimen, the stone pressed against the folds of the sheet, the flint strips at the edges cutting into the fingertips.The pain is distant, filtered by the medicine into dull oppression.There is a sweet, over-fermented fruity smell at the base of the tongue, deposited on the oral mucosa, brought out with every breath, and settled on the pillow.
The cutting machine at the stone factory outside the window had been ringing all afternoon and stopped now.Silence flooded into the room, carrying the astringent smell of limestone dust.Wei Zhiheng counted his heartbeat to the seventh beat, lost in the wave of morphine.He misperceived: It was not a heartbeat, but an underground river changing its course. The water was breaking through the foundation of the villa and seeping toward the third floor.
The door shaft let out a dry groan.Huang Jinye walked in, bringing with him a twelve-degree chill.He holds a voice recorder in his right hand. It has a black plastic casing with non-slip texture on the surface.The indicator light was red and suspended in complete darkness. Wei Zhiheng could not see it, but Huang Jinye stared at the red light as if staring at a wound.
Huang Jinye didn’t turn on the light.He walked to the camp bed and placed the recorder on the cement floor at the head of the bed – the ground was exposed, the concrete was rough, and there were tiny sand and gravel particles.The recorder made contact with the ground, making a dull plastic impact sound.The red light is on, stable, recording.
Wei Zhiheng tried to turn over, but suffered severe pain in his left hip and muscle spasms.He couldn’t lie down, so he could only lie on his side, with his knees drawn to his chest and his back arched into a shrimp shape.Huang Jinye sat down, not on the edge of the bed, but directly on the canvas, with his back pressed against Wei Zhiheng’s back.Their shoulder blades intertwined like two misaligned layers of earth.Wei Zhiheng felt a pressure coming from his back, first a dull pain, and then the conduction of temperature.
Huang Jinye’s body temperature was hot, thirty-seven degrees, transmitted through two layers of fabric (Wei’s sweater, Huang’s vest).Wei Zhiheng’s body temperature was cold, approaching sixteen degrees. The temperature difference stung on the contact surface, and a numbness spread from his spine to his limbs.Wei Zhiheng was shivering from the cold, and his teeth chattered lightly, making a slight sound.Huang Jinye felt the tremor on his back, adjusted his posture, bent his right knee, and the water swayed in the joint cavity, making a muffled sound.The sound was amplified in the silence.
Huang Jinye took out the aluminum foil package from his shorts pocket, which was rectangular and had jagged edges.Morphine patches.He ripped open the foil, the metal making a sharp tearing sound.He pinched the white patch and found that Wei Zhiheng had one patch on his lower back, which had been replaced four hours ago.He paused, crumpled the aluminum foil into a ball, and stuffed it into the gap between the iron pipes of the bed frame.The aluminum foil becomes part of the bed.
He picked up the recorder.Press the play button, the plastic button sinks and clicks.The sound of electricity came out first – rustling, low-frequency turbulence, the sound of turpentine sloshing in the bottle.Then came the voice of the physics teacher, with a Guiliu accent and a rough ending: “Electric field lines… are imaginary curves… starting from positive charges… and ending with negative charges…”
The sound came out of the speakers, mono, muddy.Wei Zhiheng turned his head and turned his left ear towards the source of the sound.The teacher’s voice sounded like it was through water: “…density indicates the strength of the field…the tangent direction indicates the direction of the field strength…”
Wei Zhiheng closed his eyes.In the darkness, the visual residue of chalk scratching on the blackboard emerged – white, straight, parallel, radiating from one point to all directions.He misperceived: those were not electric field lines.It was a tributary of the underground river that Tunbang Skywindow drilled into the limestone layer.The water is flowing.Sixteen-degree constant-temperature water, with the sweet smell of rust, was pouring out of the recording pen.
“That’s a tributary.” Wei Zhiheng said.The sound was squeezed out of the blood-moistened throat, muffled and filled with liquid.This was his first sentence of the day.
Huang Jinye did not respond.He stretched out his hand and hovered his right hand over the recording pen, stopping three centimeters away from the red indicator light.The fingers are spread out, the joints are stiff, and there is white stone powder on the edge of the nail plate.He pressed the volume button, plus sign, click.The volume increased, the teacher’s voice became louder, and the rustle of electricity expanded, filling the room and sinking to ground level.
“…uniform electric field…parallel and equidistant straight lines…”
Wei Zhiheng felt that those parallel straight lines were building a structure in his field of vision, equidistant and straight from the upper left to the lower right.But the drugs made the straight lines bend, and they began to ripple, flow down, branch out, become tributaries of an underground river.He reached out to grab it, and stretched out his right hand from the sheets, his fingernails glowing lavender, scratching in the air, trying to catch the flowing water lines.
Huang Jinye sat up straight.Wei Zhiheng slid towards the end of the bed, and Huang Jinye leaned back and pushed him back to his original position.Their backs fit together again.
“…The direction of the force on the positive charge…is the same as the direction of the field strength…”
The teacher’s voice is looping.The recorder was set to A-B repeat, and a description of electric field lines was intercepted and repeated indefinitely.The same passage is repeated at intervals, prefixed by the rustle of electricity.Wei Zhiheng lost his sense of time in the repetition. He couldn’t tell whether this was the first time he heard it or the tenth time.Morphine makes memories sticky, like turpentine.
Wei Zhiheng’s breath sprayed on the pillow, hot and moist, with the sweet smell of blood foam.Huang Jinye felt this airflow on the back of his neck, mixing with the chill outside.He adjusted his breathing, deep and slow, twelve times per minute, which matched Wei Zhiheng’s shallow and fast breathing.Every time he exhales, heat sprays on the back of Wei’s neck, bringing with it the spiciness of eucalyptus sugar and the astringency of stone powder.
Huang Jinye’s right knee pain worsened.The accumulated water in the joint cavity moves with the change of posture, causing fine tremors that spread from the thigh to the mattress and to Wei Zhiheng’s back.This tremor mixes with the electrical rustle of the recorder to form an irregular rhythm.
Wei Zhiheng’s right hand touched the iron pipe of the bed frame.The green paint peeled off to expose the silver-white metal, and the coolness spread through the palm to the ulna.He picked at the patent leather, his nails scraping against the metal, making a dry sound.Chips of paint peeled off and fell into the cracks of the bed frame, mingling with clumps of aluminum foil.He misperceived: it was not an iron pipe, but the shaft wall. He was picking at flint strips from the limestone.
Huang Jinye felt the movement behind him.He leaned back to increase the contact area between his back and Wei Zhiheng’s back, making it fit perfectly from the shoulder blades to the lumbar spine.Wei Zhiheng felt the pressure increase, and the dull pain in the bone marrow cavity was squeezed into a sharper sting, but he did not move, just accepted the pressure, like accepting the squeezing of the ground.He was cold, and the yellow embers were hot. The temperature difference caused a continuous stinging in the spine. The heat flowed from Huang to Wei, one-way and irreversible.
“…starts with positive charge…ends with negative charge…”
The recording continues.In the hallucination of morphine, Wei Zhiheng heard the roar of the underground river coming from the loudspeaker, overlapping with the teacher’s explanation.He counted the tributaries, one, two, three. When he reached the seventh, the black shadow in his field of vision crawled downwards and swallowed the upper part of the shaft.He felt that the river was flowing into his body through his arms. The sixteen-degree water mixed with the sweetness of morphine formed new tributaries in his blood vessels.
Huang Jinye’s right hand fell down and pressed on the canvas of the camp bed, pressing on the gap on the right side of Wei Zhiheng’s body.The canvas sank under the pressure and the springs groaned.His fingers sank into the indentation of the canvas, forming an encircling posture with Wei Zhiheng’s waist, but did not touch the skin. They only transmitted pressure through the canvas, fixing Wei Zhiheng’s sliding body.
Wei Zhiheng stopped picking at the bed frame.He tightened his grip on the limestone specimen, the stone pressing against the sheet, its weight sinking the canvas deeper.The bottom surface of the specimen is flat, fits the palm of the hand, and has sharp edges.He misperceived: the stone expanded in his palm and turned into a huge limestone, pressing down on his thighs to prevent him from floating away.
The recorder’s red light flashed steadily in the darkness, once every two seconds.Although Wei Zhiheng couldn’t see it, he felt that there was heat radiation in that direction, and the plastic shell was slightly heated when it was running.He counted the flashing intervals of the red light, one, two, three. When he counted to the seventh time, the wave of morphine surged up again, pushing him into coma.The last thing he felt before losing consciousness was the temperature on his back, Huang’s hotness, and his coolness, forming an eternal temperature difference in his spine, and the heat flowed from hot to cold.
Huang Jinye remained sitting, back to back, until Wei Zhiheng’s breathing became deep, with a gurgling sound of blood foam.He didn’t turn off the lights or stop recording.The rustle of electricity continued, and the teacher’s voice circulated: “Starts from positive charge…ends from negative charge…”
In the early morning, the battery of the recorder ran out.The red light went out, and the room fell into complete darkness and silence.There was only the sound of two people breathing, one deep, one shallow, one fast, one slow, intertwining above the cot.Huang Jinye’s right knee was stiff and water had solidified in the joint cavity. He slowly adjusted his posture inch by inch to avoid waking Wei Zhiheng.He felt the dampness on the canvas – Wei Zhiheng’s cold sweat, or blood, sticky and cold.
He maintained his back-to-back posture until the darkest moment before dawn, when the first cutting sound of the stone factory outside the window sounded, with a stable frequency and out-of-time with the roar of the underground river.