Daomu Biji: Restart

I took a deep breath and looked at my phone, only to find that there was no text message. There was only that New Year's greeting text on the message preview screen.

I paused. Fatty chased after me and asked, "What's the matter, Mr. Naïve? If this kind of thing can scare you, it’s like you’ve gone back to your old self."

"Is it my Uncle Three?" I asked him. "Take a closer look for me."

When Fatty saw my expression, he knew I wasn't joking. His face sank and he patted me on the shoulder before going back into the room. I looked at my phone again and found that I really didn’t get a text message. That’s strange, I thought to myself.

Most of the windows in the ruins had rotted and collapsed. The sun was shining outside and the light streaking into the room formed a bright rectangle, but the place was still very cold. I looked around and noticed that a large number of filing cabinets blocked the light from reaching this space. The message alert just now shouldn’t have been an auditory hallucination and must've come from somewhere nearby. But when I looked around, there wasn’t anyone or anything suspicious.

I didn't have any confidence in my mental state right now, and slowly started to wonder if I was going crazy. After a few minutes, Fatty called from the room, "Mr. Naïve, has your Uncle Three ever gone by the name Yang Daguang?”

"Not that I know of,” I replied.

"Then I don’t think this is your Uncle Three," He said.

When I walked back in, I saw that he had taken an old ID card from the corpse’s pants pocket and was looking at it under his phone’s flashlight. I went over and saw that the name on the ID card really was Yang Daguang. He was born in 1948 and was from Luoyang.

The ID card and a stack of other things in the pants pocket were tied together with a rubber band and placed inside a plastic bag. There was a library card, a work permit, and a series of certificates inside. With the exception of being damp and yellow with age, they were actually pretty well preserved.

Fatty flipped the photo over and I saw that it wasn’t Uncle Three at all. This corpse’s face just seemed to resemble him. There was no doubt that this person must have been Yang Daguang.

Fatty patted me and then put his forehead against mine, "Old foxes don’t die so easily. Don’t even fucking think about it."

I was so relieved that I felt my legs go weak. I was just trying to calm myself down when Jin Wantang spoke up from the side, "Little Master Three, you look down on me too much. Did you really think I couldn’t tell whether this was Master Three’s body or not?"

After taking a few deep breaths, I felt all my senses finally return to normal. There was a strong musty odor that was accompanied by an underlying stench. I patted my face and looked down at the corpse’s jacket. It looked so similar to my Uncle Three’s jacket that I didn’t believe it was a mere coincidence.

I soon discovered that the corpse wasn’t actually wearing the jacket, but had it placed around its shoulders. Fatty coughed and I realized that he wasn’t done speaking.

When I looked at him, he continued, "Don't be too happy. Even though this person isn’t your Uncle Three, he may be your Uncle Three's boyfriend." With that said, he handed me a photo.

The old photo must have also been in that pile of documents just now. It was moldy and wrinkled, but I could still make out three people’s images in it. They were wearing engineering hats from the 1980s, carrying big bags, and there were mountains in the background. They must have been working on a construction project around the rivers and mountains. The photo was in color, and it showed both Uncle Three and Yang Daguang. The two men stood side by side, holding hands, and there was another person in the distance.

It was Chen Wen-Jin.

"This photo was with his work permit,” Fatty said. “Isn’t it a little odd for a grown man to put a photo of your Uncle Three in with his work permit?"

"He likes Chen Wen-Jin," I said. Even though Yang Daguang was facing the camera, his body was leaning towards Chen Wen-Jin's direction. It looked like he and Uncle Three were holding hands, but Uncle Three was actually holding him tightly and Yang Daguang's fingers weren’t closed. Uncle Three must have pulled him to take this photo, but all his thoughts were on Chen Wen-Jin. "What the hell did this person do?"

Fatty handed me the work permit, which stated that Yang Daguang was an employee in the archives room. I looked between the photo and the work permit. It didn’t make sense for Uncle Three and Chen Wen-Jin to be out in the wild with someone in charge of archives. This person must’ve had an identity we hadn’t discovered yet.

Based on Uncle Three's attitude towards him in the photo, they must’ve been very good friends. Uncle Three didn’t have many friends, and even if they were ordinary friends, they wouldn’t go into the mountains together.

Uncle Three put this jacket on Yang Daguang's body after he died, which meant that he must’ve come here, discovered that his friend had died, and then put the jacket on the body.

Did Uncle Three lead me here so that I could collect his friend's body? But how did his friend die in this secret room?

As Fatty continued rummaging around the reception room, he said to me, "This old man must’ve died suddenly. He probably came to this secret room to hide. The people in the weather station probably didn’t even know that he died here. Look at his big mouth. He must’ve hidden in this area to do something, and I bet it was strange. Hurry up and look around."

I went through everything bit by bit, looking at it all patiently but quickly. There were meal tickets, newspaper clippings, and a lot of meteorological files. To be honest, I couldn't understand the icons and data at all. Most of them were so moldy and decayed that they crumbled at the slightest touch. Fatty dropped to the ground, looked under the furniture, and let out an exclamation.

I also squatted down and saw a pile of boxes under the bed. They were all leather shoes boxes from the 1990s that had been placed inside plastic bags. Fatty lay down, pulled out a few, and opened them while praying, "Please be land deeds, please be land deeds."

But when we opened them, we found that the shoe boxes were full of cassette tapes like the ones I used to listen to music to.

Fatty and I looked at each other.

He took out a tape and looked at it. There was a note written on it that said "Peony Pavilion". It looked like it was a recorded version of Yu Zhenfei’s performance (1).

"Kunqu Opera? Was the old man a fan of operas?” Fatty was bewildered.

I took all the shoe boxes out from underneath the bed, opened them all, and found that they were full of tapes of various operas. I was even more confused.

Fatty rummaged through the rest of the room but found nothing. When we left the room to catch our breath, Jin Wantang wiped the sweat from his forehead and handed me a cigarette. He kept saying that he didn't lie to me and that this place was evil. He advised me to hurry up and sell it so that I could make some money and pay him back for all the money Uncle Three owed him. The money he had spent to buy this place wasn’t an investment but a loan.

I looked at the tapes and ignored him. Jin Wantang definitely wanted to take the land for himself, but it was pointless to argue with him now. We had too much dirt on each other, so there was no reason to bother with it. It wasn’t like I was in a hurry to deal with this piece of land anyways.

My main focus right now was on figuring out why Uncle Three asked me to find this Yang Daguang, and why I had to find these tapes. Were they really just opera recordings?

I left Fatty and Jin Wantang to deal with each other, called a cab, and then took to the streets to try and find a used cassette player. It was difficult, but I finally found a specialty shop in Suzhou that had one in stock. I brought it back to the hotel that evening, plugged it in, and then put a tape in it.

There was static for about thirty seconds, and then a series of strange sounds came from the player. It was like drumming and someone whispering. The sounds were intermittent and accompanied by a lot of white noise.

I thought that the player was broken or the tape had been demagnetized, but the tape spools were still rotating. I also tried switching out the tapes several more times, but they all had the same sound.

I was depressed, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. After listening carefully to more than a dozen tapes, I suddenly realized what I was hearing.

It was thunder.

All these tapes had recorded the sound of thunder.

****

TN Notes:

(1) “Peony Pavilion” is a romantic tragicomedy play written by dramatist Tang Xianzu in 1598. The play was originally written for staging as Kunqu Opera, one of the genres of traditional Chinese theater arts like Flower Drum (Huaguxi) Opera and Peking Opera. More info on the play here. Yu Zhenfei was the 20th century's most distinguished performer of Kunqu Opera. Here's a small blurb with some info about him.