Note: Meng Sheng simply means "Mr. Meng" — a man surnamed Meng.
I
I first met Meng Sheng in 2015. At the time, he was writing stories on the BBS of a university in the eastern suburbs — tales of beauties conjured from monsoon winds and nights of fleeting dew. Back then, he was as formless as the monsoon itself, seemingly made of pure transparency and emptiness. Only when the angle of sunlight was just right could you catch, in the faint shimmer and undulation of the air, a rough outline of him. From that time on, we drank together on Leyou Plateau. It was a place no one knew about — nothing but vast wild grass, a stone table (really just a big rock), and two stone benches (really just two smaller rocks). For the first year or two, we were like steelworkers who, barely freed from the steaming toil of the afternoon, plunged headlong into the cool of evening and started drinking. The first few cups of wine reflected the sky's thin, misty blue; then came that deep, quiet, seemingly eternal blue; and finally, night descended with the force of a sudden storm — pure black. We drank through the whole night, and the next day, each of us woke up wherever we were supposed to wake up. In those days, Meng Sheng was talkative. Once, he spoke again of beauties conjured from monsoon winds. "This one I met the following spring," he said. He called her "Spring." Spring led him to drink the morning dew, to run wild through the city of Chang'an. When they ran they had no shape — like a wind that couldn't stop, making the green leaves dance and rustle. They played until evening, when the sky dimmed just enough for painting. Spring drew a huge frame in the void before them, and the picture grew out of it like a plant — boom, boom, boom. At first glance it was two trees, branches intertwined, their crowns crowned with enormous red flowers — the kind they give as prizes in kindergarten. On closer inspection, the trees were two people: Mr. X and Ms. Y. Their leaves shivered and shook — green and translucent on the front, silver and reflective on the back. Arm in arm, their eyes blown happy and dreamy by the spring wind, knee-deep grass at their feet, great beads of dew refracting the sun's radiance. "How beautiful," Meng Sheng said, "it would be even better if it happened in autumn. Then someone seeing this painting would surely write: 'Now, she is getting married, at this full and vivid age, in this beautiful, rain-drenched autumn. From now on, a man will appear by her side, and they will walk arm in arm, on and on.'" That was all Meng Sheng said that night. After the revelry, I happened to wake up at Chaotianmen Wharf in Chongqing. The great river rolled on, the sky was full of stars. Dawn hadn't broken yet — it was that color just before dawn, the kind that fills your heart with excitement and expectation.
II
The next time we met, it suddenly occurred to me to ask: "Who would write those words? Who exactly were you talking about last time?" "Oh, you know who," Meng Sheng said. He was in high spirits that time, his body turning slightly transparent and luminous — a dazzling white, clothes and all. He was very happy, drinking heartily while talking nonsense. He said that between spring and summer there is an extremely brief span of time — as brief as that eternal blue of evening in certain cities. If you walk the streets then, you feel your heart swell until it nearly fills your body. When people happen to cross paths at a street corner, they resonate and bounce like two drums, and then ascend into ecstasy. Ecstasy is not very high up in the sky. There, they send the lonely universe booming and rattling, and finally scatter completely, becoming pale-green, steaming, inseparable air. "You're getting a bit far afield," I reminded him. "What about 'that person'? What about Mr. X and Ms. Y?" "Yes, yes," Meng Sheng said, "I saw it when I was walking with 'that person.'" He said they passed an art museum and saw the painting in the evening sky — the light was just right, exactly as it had been when Spring painted it. At that moment, everyone's hearts were pounding wildly. They saw Mr. X and Ms. Y throbbing and heaving, stretching their bodies out of the frame like jellyfish, trying to join the crowd ascending into ecstasy in the sky — but they failed. "Why?" "'That person' said their feet were stuck." Meng Sheng said. He said their feet were stuck to the ground by something. When the wind blew the grass in the painting, you could faintly see their stuck ankles, covered in black and lovely mud. "They must have walked a very long way to get here — they must have. Along the road, they must have looked down at the path, lush with water grass, and their gaze stuck the mud of the journey to their feet — mud that still carried the black, transparent clarity of their eyes." They had set out as lovely children, and along the way stuffed themselves into bigger shoes, bigger clothes, and bigger bodies. "All of this is what 'that person' said," Meng Sheng concluded. "Who exactly is 'that person'?" I asked again. "A woman I met at a wedding," Meng Sheng said, knocking back a big cup — in the dark you couldn't tell what kind of drink it was. "The ground at weddings is a terrible thing. I'm speaking of a fictional wedding, you understand. On the ground at such weddings, in certain places, there's a soft, gelatinous substance. You'd better not step on it, and you certainly don't want to look at it. Once you've seen it, you can never forget."
III
The next time I saw Meng Sheng was several months later. He had faded from white to a faintly transparent black. He clinked his glass gently against mine. We drank slowly. He never mentioned the woman, and I didn't mention the exhilarating sky above Chaotianmen Wharf. We both seemed to sense something, talking in fits and starts. It wasn't until the darkness became very, very deep — too dark for either of us to see the other — that his voice grew clear: "The grass has withered, the leaves have fallen. Now you can see Mr. X's and Ms. Y's feet. They're stuck firmly to the ground, standing ramrod straight, like trees stripped of all their youthful foliage." "I'm just repeating what I heard," Meng Sheng said. I assumed he'd heard it from "that person." "Apparently, Ms. Y was the first to notice the mud on her own feet," Meng Sheng continued. "She realized the mud was the same color as Mr. X's body. She got angry and hurled a fistful of mud at Mr. X. Mr. X punched the mud to pieces, and it splattered all over both of them." Later, Ms. Y angrily kicked with the one foot that wasn't stuck, but Mr. X furiously clutched her foot to his chest. They both stared at the ground; the more they looked, the more mud there seemed to be, flowing faster and faster. It flowed through Ms. Y's body, down her leg and foot, eroding her skin, until finally it fused her leg to Mr. X's chest, forming a conduit for the flowing substance. When they were so angry they wouldn't look at each other, they just stood there, like an H-shaped monument. "But how could the mud keep increasing?" I asked. "Exactly," Meng Sheng said. "Mr. X hired a well-drilling company, wanting to bore a well beneath his feet and drain the substance from their bodies. When they broke through the surface, the stuff whooshed downward, and they felt a bit of lightness, their colors growing paler. They even embraced warmly, thanking each other for having formed a conduit." "And then?" "The drilling company kept digging, gradually touching a void with no material quality. 'We've broken through,' they said, and withdrew beyond the frame. But when Mr. X and Ms. Y tried to step out of the painting, their eyes fell once more on their stuck feet and the starry void beneath. And just then, the viscous mud on their bodies began to swirl and flow again, cycling through that well of void, back into their bodies." Sometimes they felt exhilarated, sometimes ravenous with longing, desperately trying to squeeze themselves out of the frame. Once, their original outlines were pressed so hard they were extruded beyond the painting, dancing like living things in the bright, gentle room outside — then fell to the floor and proved to be nothing but lifeless fragments. This only made them purer inside the painting; stripped of the shapes they'd accumulated along the way, they became abstract vessels, containing the transparent viscosity surging within. In that flow, their limbs invaded each other, and they couldn't help but feel that this shape was, somehow, a deep and loving embrace. "How terrifying," I thought. "How can that well have no bottom?" In the darkness, Meng Sheng seemed to hear my thoughts. He said: "That well seems to have drilled into a dark interior that connects everything inside the earth. It's a Möbius-strip-like cave with no beginning and no end. If you observe this blue planet from just the right angle and distance, you can see a tiny singularity in a sea of blue. When that happens, you must never stare into it. Once you've seen such a thing, you can never forget." "Remember that," Meng Sheng told me. "And the gelatin at the wedding — don't look at it, whatever you do. Once you look, you'll fall into that hole." "All right," I said. I didn't tell him that when I looked up, an H hung faintly in the night sky.
IV
Then a long time passed — and looking back from now, another long time ago — I saw him again. By the time we met, it was already dark, and he was darker than the night, as if the night's blackness flowed from his body. We sat in the dark, drinking inky wine. He'd probably just come from the reservoir court, still carrying the whoosh of a basketball tearing through the night air. Neither of us spoke. During the long night, sometimes he was so dark I doubted he was even there — even doubted that any such person as Meng Sheng existed at all. In the end, we came later and later each time, and every visit was pure black. No one could see anyone, no one could hear anyone, no one knew anyone, no one could leave anyone. Once, Xi'an had a tremendous snowfall. Snow spread over the earth, blindingly bright, as if the sun had been ground to dust and mixed into the snow before it fell. The whiteness of that snow reminded me of Meng Sheng, and of the sky that once made my heart leap. But that night, we both understood: we would never see a sky like that again. And there, between absolute light and absolute dark, I drank slowly. I thought: Meng Sheng is probably here. The story of Mr. X and Ms. Y isn't over yet, is it? What else has peeled off them, drifting outside the frame? Meng Sheng and his lady friend — at the wedding, they didn't really look at that soft gelatin, did they? I lifted my eyes to the absolute blackness of the sky. A clear H hung there. I could even see the hollow eyes of Mr. X and Ms. Y, gazing with infinite depth. What exactly was the mud on Mr. X and Ms. Y? What was that soft gelatin at the wedding? What was inside that hole in the earth's interior? I turned these questions over slowly in my mind. A voice rose within me. It was Meng Sheng. Infinitely clear and calm. He said: "It is darkness."