Chapter One · First Cycle: Traced Back Through the FlamesSubchapter 1: An Old Photo by the Hospital Bed
The fluorescent light in the hospital room hummed faintly, like a fly trapped in a glass bottle.
Lin Jianguo lay in the hospital bed, his eyes half-open, staring at the crack on the ceiling. The crack wound its way from the edge of the light fixture all the way to the corner—identical to the crack on the roof of his childhood home sixty-five years ago.
No, not identical. That crack had been in an earthen wall; when you touched it, bits of dirt crumbled off. This was a cement ceiling—smooth, cold, yielding nothing.
On the bedside table sat a bowl of millet porridge, its skin wrinkled into a thin film. Next to it were two medicine bottles, one white, one brown—the labels too blurry for him to read. Not that it mattered; the nurse told him every day which was for blood pressure and which was for his heart.
He'd been listening for three months now.
His right hand was clenched around something, clenched so tight the knuckles had gone white. Slowly, he loosened his grip. In his palm lay a photograph.
Black and white, yellowed at the edges, creased in several places. Where the creases were deepest, the color had faded to white—worn smooth by countless touches.
Three people in the photograph.
The man stood on the left, wearing a faded blue work uniform, sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing lean, sinewy forearms. He grinned broadly, showing a canine tooth, the crow's feet at his eyes crinkling like two open fans.
The woman stood on the right, in a floral-print blouse, her hair neatly combed and tied in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wasn't smiling, just pressing her lips together slightly—but her eyes were curved. That was a smile deeper than any grin.
Between them stood a child, seven or eight years old, with a closely cropped head and a cotton jacket clearly too big for him, the sleeves rolled up twice to free his hands. He craned his neck stubbornly, glaring at the camera with obvious reluctance, as if to say: What's there to photograph? I've got bird nests to raid.
Lin Jianguo gently rubbed his thumb over the faces of the two adults in the photograph. Sixty-seven years. His fingers could no longer distinguish between the texture of the photographic paper and the warmth of memory.
"Grandpa Lin, time to take your temperature."
The nurse pushed open the door, thermometer gun in hand. She was young, in her early twenties, with a ponytail and a slight Northeastern accent when she spoke.
Lin Jianguo didn't move. His eyes remained fixed on the photograph.
The nurse walked over and habitually glanced at the photo in his hand—in the three months she'd been coming to this room, every time she entered, she saw Grandpa Lin clutching that photograph. She'd never asked who was in it. Some things you don't need to ask.
"Thirty-seven point two, normal." She put away the thermometer and glanced at the untouched millet porridge. "Grandpa Lin, you need to eat something. It's gone cold."
"They're still waiting for me," Lin Jianguo suddenly said.
The nurse was caught off guard. "What?"
Lin Jianguo looked up. Something flickered in his clouded eyes. He looked at the nurse, yet seemed to look past her, his gaze fixed on some distant place.
"They're still waiting for me," he repeated, his voice very soft, as if talking to himself. "I know they are. They've always been waiting for me."
The nurse opened her mouth, not knowing what to say. She'd worked in this hospital for three years, seen too many dying patients, said too many comforting words. But she knew that some words were useless even if spoken, and sometimes you just needed to be quiet and listen.
The heart monitor beside the bed suddenly let out a long, sustained beep.
The nurse spun around and saw the green waveform trembling violently—then flattening into a straight line.
"Grandpa Lin!"
She lunged for the call button. Footsteps approached from outside the door, doctors and nurses rushed in, someone pushed a defibrillator, someone shouted "make way," someone pressed an oxygen mask to Lin Jianguo's face.
In all the chaos, no one noticed the photograph slip from Lin Jianguo's loosening fingers and drift gently to the floor.
The three people in the photo were still smiling.
The sunlight of 1958 still shone on their faces.
Lin Jianguo's consciousness sank into darkness.
Not the terrifying kind of darkness, but a warm, soft darkness—like the cotton quilts of childhood, like a mother's embrace. He felt himself falling, yet also rising; he couldn't tell direction, couldn't feel time.
After what seemed like forever—maybe a second, maybe ten thousand years—a point of light appeared at the edge of the darkness.
Faint light, like a candle flame in the distance, like the dimmest star before dawn. He drifted toward it, closer and closer, the light growing brighter and warmer.
Then he heard a sound.
A rooster crowing.
The sound was so familiar it made his whole body tremble. Not the feeble, spiritless city roosters you sometimes heard below the hospital window, but a real country rooster, the kind that could wake up half the village with its crowing.
Then came other sounds.
The rustle of wind through leaves. The plunk of a bucket dropping into a well in the neighboring yard. A child crying somewhere, then being soothed into silence. The slow, drawn-out moo of a cow in the distance.
And smells.
The smell of earth. The smell of firewood. The smell of morning dew. And a faint, elusive smell of cooking grain.
Lin Jianguo's eyes flew open.