Translated by Hinh
When you open the refrigerator while it is running, you hear a faint humming sound.
Have you heard it before?
It is so light, as if there is actually another world inside the fridge. The moment you open the door, the two worlds briefly intersect. The refrigerated compartment is usually lit by a warm yellow bulb; older refrigerators still used Freon, and the compressor would make its own small noises.
To me, the sound feels like a portal in time and space. The moment it opens, you can hear something arriving from a far shore beyond both time and distance, something like the sound of an angel’s halo.
It is an abstract sound.
But I believe most people have heard it, and can imagine it.
What if it never stopped ringing?
Today I sat in front of my computer, with the noise of the range hood behind me. Everything was vibrating; the fan kept announcing its presence. I tried to use my laptop.
And then—
I heard again that sound, as if from another world, calling for me with all its strength.
Once, at Sanqing Taoist Temple in Qingdao, I saw a stone wall. The legend said that those who cultivated enough goodness could pass straight through it, and so many Taoists went there to ram themselves against the wall. When I was little, I thought: if the point is only to pass through the wall, then wouldn’t it still count as goodness if only the soul passed through while the body stayed where it was?
The senses are often deceiving people.
At that moment, it felt as though my laptop screen were a wall, and those rustling sounds were beckoning to me through time and space.
If I smashed straight into the screen, would anything become different?
It took me five days to realize this was an auditory hallucination.
A false sensation.
I turned the volume on my computer up and down, and Windows made its calibration sound: ding-dong. That was real.
The clock clicks once every second.
There is a quantified stress metric called HRV, and many smartwatches can monitor it. My stress index stays in the red for most of the day, whether I am asleep or awake. I do not know whether I am standing on the edge of losing my mind completely, while the computer screen, the refrigerator, the desk lamp—the outside world—
keeps ringing.
In middle school and high school, I believed there was a cricket living inside my desk lamp.
I tried turning the lamp on and off. The current ran through it. I tried to electrocute that cricket. I tried many times, and failed every time.
The sound of the cricket never disappeared.
So I, too, lived with a kind of reverence for the life inhabiting the lamp.
All of this feels like delirium, and also like a hallucination.
The entire galaxy is collapsing inward with me as its distant axis.
Then everything converges into a new singularity,
and I am waiting for a Big Bang.