Chapter 41: The Admiral of the Nine Gates (I)
What happened in the small courtyard of Sweetwater Garden basically came to an end in '97. Writing%Fun%Pavilion www.biquge.info Sometimes, in retrospect, I am more of a dispassionate bystander. I didn't see, I didn't hear, I didn't even perceive in advance what was going on with the person in question, the narrator, and what each narrator was referring to was only a part of a larger story. Several times, I felt that I had touched the heart of the matter, but the telling of another event forced me to reject the previous judgment, and the trouble was that there were always some inextricable connections between these seemingly independent stories, and these connections were contradictory, making it difficult for me to distinguish between truth and falsehood. For example, the story of Li Chan and Shijie in Jinnan has nothing to do with Fang Mojin's coming from Shanxi to Jingzi Lane in Beijing, and their descriptions are obviously different, and for example, the three-headed statue connects the sights and experiences of Pian Er Police Officer Liu and Grandma Qi with the reality of me, Ah Chao, Wu Nan, and Lao Hao, while Fang Mojin, the other party of this statue, says little about it. What kind of connection will there be between the tank in the small courtyard of the enlarged courtyard, the well in the basement of the main building of the school, the tomb in the yin house in Jingzi Lane, and the buried stone letter in the north and south mountains of Jin? Thinking of this, I feel that the matter may be far from over.
In the 2,000th year, I was unwilling to live a peaceful life in the government, but after a failed start-up, I returned to the agency system and worked as a planner in a cultural performance company directly under a certain ministry. That year, the company planned a big project to build the world's largest temporary audience stand between the end gate and the noon gate of the Forbidden City, and make a world-class performance for the Olympic bid. Time was tight, the task was heavy, all the company personnel went to the performance site to work, and I could often see the empty square and hall.
The construction project was completed by the National Railway, due to the high requirements for the protection of the Forbidden City, all kinds of large-scale construction equipment can not be entered, everything is built by hand. The ground should not be perforated, and a layer of wooden planks should be laid, and then supported and fixed on the wooden boards. And with this huge project came a series of unexplained visions.
A few days after the start of the project, the southeast corner of the first to start, has been built six or seven meters high scaffolding collapsed, fortunately in the early morning, only two people were injured, but the strange thing is that all the fixed supports are intact, but the ground laid ten centimeters thick wooden pedestal all turned up, like a hurricane swept by, but in early March Beijing sky clear, quiet night no wind. A few days later, the same accident occurred at the scaffolding in the southwest corner.
Soon the main stage was set up, and the problem became even more serious. On the day of the start of the sound test, Lao Liu, the sound director of the scene, took a microphone and was feeding non-stop, when suddenly the light was holographic, and electric sparks kept shooting on the light stand. Lao Liu's "lighting group, who is on duty" words, was pulled out by the stereo out of a long tail note, this tail note is not from the main speakers on both sides of the stage, but from the tall end door behind the gloomy darkness, flying over our heads, blocked by the noon door, and back, around a group of us, this feeling is difficult to describe in words, more than ten years later, I still remember the reason, is the first time I felt, the sound is tangible, even self-conscious.
After a few seconds, the tail note disappeared, and the dozens of people on the scene were silent, as if waiting for the moment when the curtain opened. There was a slight rustle in the speakers, a seemingly casual, rhythmic rustle, like a stylus slicing through vinyl records, like fingernails slicing through silk satin. Then there are hundreds of speakers placed on both sides of the nearly kilometer stands, and the rustling sound that comes out slowly, from far to near, seems hazy and clear, making your heartbeat unconsciously synchronized, followed by a sense of suffocation. After the incident passed, the people in the audio and video team told me that the 100 speakers were not powered to Ben, but everyone at the scene heard the rustling sound from all directions, from the high and low audio, and from the depths of the heart.
The rustling at that time may not have been as long as you read the above description, but it seems to be the longest wait in a person's life. After that, there was a brief vacuum, and the voices of people drifted in the distance. "The ice wheel is away from the island, the sky is very clear, the bright moon is in the sky, just like Chang'e leaving the Moon Palace...... "God, I am covered in cold hairs, and the little heat in my body is swept away, I believe that I know more about this Tsing Yi than dozens of people on the scene, it is the kind of unforgettable understanding, although a few years have passed, just like yesterday again. When others were immersed in the ethereal realm that seemed to be illusory, I had already been knocked down into the endless graveyard of the Yin Mansion in the well alley.
My loss of soul only lasted for a few dozen seconds, and Lao Liu's hoarse voice broke through the darkness, "What's the matter, who let the concubine get drunk, and say yes, isn't it a Dionysian comedy?" As soon as the words fell, the lighting came, and several pillars of light converged on Lao Liu's body in the center of the stage, shaking him so much that he covered his face with his hands, and the wheat also fell to the ground. I tried my best to adapt to the sudden attack of the strong light, rubbing my eyes and looking behind Lao Liu, the moment the strong light came down, I seemed to see a few figures, a few figures in costumes, fleeting.
On that day, most people saw the figure behind Lao Liu, but the statements were very different, some said that it was the palace maid, some said it was singing, some said it was the projection of Lao Liu's own caused by the light source, and some said that it was the fox fairy who appeared, and the fairy went down to earth. But the speculation of this matter spread like a plague through the crowd. What kind of worker woke up and found that he was sleeping in the Tai Chi Hall and was locked inside; what kind of girl in the stage art group got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and disappeared for five hours and was found by the Forbidden City administrator at the bottom of the rockery in the Imperial Garden; what was the tent of the headquarters on the west side of the Duanmen Gate and was painted with white spray paint at night with a large-headed portrait, and so on. The only thing I saw with my own eyes was the accidental fire in the timber yard and the white cloth banner incident on the stage.
The timber yard is on the east side of Duanmen Square, inside the corner gate of Donghua Gate, it was the second half of the night when it caught fire, and it was found early, and it was extinguished by everyone before it burned big. But the security guard at the timber yard said that in the middle of the night, he saw a light blue ghost fire, circling back and forth around the timber pile, and as soon as people passed, the blue fire was extinguished. When the man walked away, the blue fire came out again, tossed a few times, and no one paid any attention to it, and in the second half of the night, the blue fire plunged into the wood pile, and the fire ignited. When I got into the tent and ran to look, the fire was not completely extinguished, it was a pale blue flame, and it looked cold and cold, not at all like a temperature. And the wood on fire does not seem to be burning, but like the wood itself is peeling off the veneer layer by layer. As soon as the security guard sprayed the fire extinguisher, the flames disappeared, leaving no trace of black smoke.
I haven't figured out the matter of the white cloth banner on the stage, mainly because I can't guess the motive of the perpetrator. There will be electric curtain poles one by one above the large performance stage, and the more scenes, the more complex the choreography, and the more layers of the curtain poles. We had 12 sets of curtain poles for that performance, and the first one was the one that hung the curtain. On the day the stage was built, the stage team did a rehearsal. It was an evening with Pavarotti playing on the main speakers, and the artistic director and artistic advisors were seated in the first row, the dark red curtain hanging silently, and the sun was setting in the dark. At the end of the song, the stage director pressed the switch, and the curtain slowly rose to the next scene.
As the curtain continues to rise, the background seems to be a three-foot-wide white cloth, and there are long tassels falling in the lower part, which seems to be the white flags used for the grave, a row of more than 30, which is very spectacular. Watching the curtain rise to the top of the stage, white paper flowers floated down from above, like snow and frost, and there was a chill on that early summer night.