At thirty-five, I liked to go to the gym at night and shoot baskets alone in the dark. Every day I walked 1.5 kilometers in a straight line, arrived at the gym, took off my down jacket, put on my noise-canceling headphones, and began shooting. Some nights the shots fell more often than others. The sound the ball made swishing through the net—that lubricated howl rushing through the darkness—reminded me of something. I can't help but say it's connected, in some way, to the reservoir court incident twenty years ago.
It was not long after the wild donkey's dunk at the People's Hospital court. At noon I was watching My Own Swordsman again, laughing my head off at Guo Furong, Lü Xiucai, and Li Dazui. My mom said, "Is it really that funny?" I said, "You don't know—it's hilarious." The silence outside at that moment was like the silence I once encountered traveling from Xi'an to a county town in Hanzhong—that people actually lived in such silence! It was the kind of silence as if everyone in the world had gone on vacation.
After lunch, a few classmates came to find me. The plan this time was to walk along the Xun River. We brought some fake liquor (we didn't know it was fake at the time), sang many songs along the way, and said many things I can no longer remember.
It was a court by a reservoir. The night was very dark, and we decided not to go back. No matter what, we would stay in that damp, dark night. By all reason the court was above the water, yet I always had the feeling it was below it. Now, looking back, time is like water that has submerged that night when we were seventeen. All of China, the entire world had lost power, yet somehow I could still see.
We sat on the damp ground. Some lay down, some sat. No one could say a word.
A middle-aged man was there, shooting baskets. He looked at nothing, listened to nothing. When the ball rolled to me, I tossed it back to him. The night was so dark it seemed the ball dissolved the moment it left your hand. I sat there all night, listening to that howling sound of the darkness.
I think the basketball we middle-aged men love is not on any stage—it lives in a night like that. In truth, we don't even love basketball. We don't love anything. We don't want to see anything. We can't hear anything.
When I got back, the fake liquor made me throw up everywhere. My mom gave me water and some congee. I turned on the television. Guo Furong and Lü Xiucai were still in there. Li Dazui would come out soon—I knew his lines by heart. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to fall asleep.
"This is so good," I told my mom. In my mind, a jumble of images flashed by: a donkey dunking against a mint-colored sky, the dusk that arrived on a concrete court where we lay sprawled every which way, the darkness, and the life unfolding across all pasts, presents, and futures.