CHAPTER 6 THE CHAMBER

One night I came to work as usual. I could sense that something was different that night. She seemed to be quite excited about something. She was dressed in a classic western dress. I could almost imagine her riding and whipping along through the dust of the Great West like in those movies.

'Phil, no more reading tonight. We are going for the real thing.' She said it with piercing eyes looking straight through to my hidden soul. I nodded in consent, as I felt so powerless in her company. That was my fatal weakness, a guinea pig under a feminine spell. Sometimes, I would become rather angry about my seemingly non-resistance to the feminine spell. With men, I would normally be able to figure out one way or another to take control of the situation. But this time, I was happy to let go myself. I had already surrendered to her.

She led me upstairs by the hand. Her hand was cool and silky, like her body. I was numbing and losing senses with every upward step. I tried to regain myself. She loosened her grip as if I was losing my final straw. I hurriedly grasped her hand and indulged myself in the iciness of her skin. She smiled at me encouragingly, as if she was leading me to the death chamber. Her smiling eyes were winking with her usual good sense of humour. She looked like a goddess, rather than a murderess. I felt safe and yet lost in her Wild Western charm. She was wearing a particular heavy perfume which weighed me down with its descent. It was dwarfing my already numbing senses. I had the Western picture in my mind that she was going to shoot me as her target. I could see her juggling her gun out of the gun pocket and raising her gun straight at me. I stared into this dark barrel of her gun…

The house seemed to have a complex structure. We twisted and turned on the narrow stairs and short passages, spiralling upwards and onwards. I did not know where this was leading. I had the feeling as if I was back at Omni.com, led by the Boss with her red hair flowing back. We entered a green door and into a fully mirrored room. It was like a mirror box with a bed, a chair and a desk, with some equipment on it. I guessed this was the lie-detector. I was told to lie down on the bed and she tied my hands and feet onto the bedpost. I looked at myself in the mirror above. That was me, perpetually in this sort of bondage throughout my life, one way or another. I was definitely a leaf in the wild northwest wind. I could never break free. Freedom for me could only be freedom of my soul. She was attaching various sensors onto my body. She seemed to be enjoying it, though not in a malicious mood.

She turned on the machine and twitched something. A sharp pain went to my left leg. She smiled and told me that was a warning shot to tell me not to tell anything but truth. I looked at her in her lovely dress and her lovely smile. I could not bring myself to hate her. I probably deserved all the punishment for all the idle hours in my life.

I was ready to answer the questions, but none was coming. She was writing on her laptop as if I did not exist. I was left to lie there in my wierd position. I thought of asking her about what was going on. I changed my mind and opted for silence which seemed to be a preferred status for me. I went deep into my own thoughts and went all the way back to my childhood.

According to my mother, I was born in a revolutionised hospital in the downtown of Shanghai, where there was no qualified doctors around. I was born with my brain hanging in a skin bulb outside of my head. Many thought I would die and my uncle had actually suggested to dump me in a bin. Thankfully, my mother persevered with me and I survived. I was sent back to my grandparents in the countryside of Shanghai as it was the tradition then. I could not remember much for that period of my life. I was told that I was nearly drowned a few times in the river at the back of our house. So I was sent back to live with my mother, who was being re-educated in a labour re-education factory in a town called Luodian.

I could remember that the factory was made up of dozens of people. One group were the educators, who were the revolutionaries and mainly former factory workers. Another group were there to be re-educated including county officers, school headmasters, engineers and so on. There was one odd group which only had one woman, who belonged to the Black Five Category. I could not remember how old she was. In my mind, she was quite old with a hunch back. She was short and thin. She always did those odd jobs nobody else cared to do, such as watering the cement columns at high noon when the sun was deadly hot. I was curious about everything about her. I went to help her a few times. She was a bit taken back, and told me not to. I also worked with my mother in the workshop. For me, it was all a bit of harmless fun and I enjoyed it.

Apparently my mother's crime was not too great and my father was still a revolutionary in some power somewhere else. My mother was given the priviledge to look over this woman, who lived in the attic above us. Once she gave me some cooked sweet potatoes and my mother asked me to give them back to her. I thought she looked rather pale and unwell that day.

Life was quite smooth living with my mother and her colleagues. One of the men there was very friendly with us. He asked me to call him Lao Jiao, which meant an old friend. He sometimes took me to see films in the town. He was in charge of education in the County Office before he was turned in to be re-educated. He told me a lot of stories. On the other hand, the man who was in charge of the factory was quite friendly with us too. I called him Uncle Qi. I was allowed total freedom as the only child there. I found their self-criticism meetings quite interesting. I remembered one time a man critised himself for taking a magazine home and he cried and cried. Soon, I started to go to the local nursery. I would go there for the morning and come back to the factory at noon to have lunch. Somehow, afternoons were supposed to be sleeping sessions followed by some singing. I hated the sleeping sessions, as I could not sleep during the day. Life was quite enjoyable at the factory, until one disaster struck.

We got back into the dark house. There was only the fire on in the fireplace. She asked me to hold her for a while on the sofa in front of the fire. We were still in our double suit. We both stared into the fire and went into our own thoughts. Everything was so quiet, apart from the cracking sound from the burning wood in the fire. I was thinking of that dreadful night when my grandma died. I saw myself burning on the fire. She closed her eyes and tears sloped down her cheeks. I was shocked and did not know what to say. She put her finger on my lips and curled back in my arms. She closed her eyes for a while. She looked very peaceful, like my grandpa when he killed himself, as if there was no a care in the world. Then, we changed and she went upstairs and was not seen that night.

On the way driving back home, I felt incredibly happy, as if I had regained something which had been lost for a long time. My thoughts went back to my time with my grandpa. I flicked through many of the sweet memories.

One stormy and rainy night, I woke up alone in the big bed which I shared with my grandpa. He was nowhere to be seen. As if I knew where he was, I went out to the greenhouse among the fields. For sure, he was there. He was not surprised to see me and did not blame me for walking out into the dark night alone. Because he had lost part of his tongue through illness, he actually had few words to say most of the time. He kept on working. When he finished, he put me on his back and carried me home. I had probably fallen asleep as soon as I was on his shoulders.

Another night under the oil lamp, we had been studying a book of Mao's writings. I was in my second year at the primary school. I remembered we had been studying this book for a long time. There were so many new words to me, and my grandpa had only overcome his illiteracy through Mao's Saomang Movement (the movement to eliminate illiteracy). We helped each other and had great fun in trying to guess what the words meant. Later on, every time we studied Mao's writings at school, I would be thinking of those nights with my grandpa.

I had always tried to bring as much happiness as possible to those I met through my life's journey. Obviously, I had caused some pains to some people as well. And I knew that I had hurt more those who cared about me than strangers in the street. I was glad that I had made Jane relive moments of her past life which had remained sweet memories to her. It was through those moments that we seemed to get to know each other even better, without saying much. For moments like that, words were so redundant. If you thought about it, we connected to each other through many other means far better than words. Probably it was because words were formal, social and clumsy at the level when our souls communicated with each other. (to be updated regularly).