SA | Chapter 3

Loss of Meaning

Gu Deng almost immediately stood up. Long before Zhang Li spoke, he had already wanted to flee countless times.

But the moment he got up, he regretted it, because Ali was just walking out from backstage, craning her neck as she searched for him in the crowd. When she kept failing to spot Gu Deng, her eyes gradually dimmed.

Gu Deng’s breathing grew faster little by little. The anxious, expectant Ali onstage partly overlapped with the him from many years ago. Back then, he had only been a tiny bit older than Ali, performing onstage for the first time, just as full of expectation, just as let down by adults.

That incident had in fact happened a very long time ago. Afterward, his adoptive parents had explained why they had failed to show up, and they had made up for it in other ways. Gu Deng could understand them, and he did not harbor any resentment. But for some reason, he suddenly thought of it here, at the worst possible moment.

Onstage, one of her bandmates patted Ali on the shoulder to remind her that the performance was about to begin. Ali nodded, but she was still reluctant to draw her gaze back.

It had never really been such a big matter to begin with, only one trivial broken promise. A child might think one performance was very important, but adults had their own things to deal with too.

But why was it that even today, he still had not forgotten…

Gu Deng let out a soft breath, raised his right hand, and waved it in the air. Ali found him, her expression clearing at once, and she bounced right there on the stage. Beside her, a man blew a bone flute, and the performance began.

Gu Deng sat back down again and said to Zhang Li, “Sorry. I’m fine. Thanks for earlier.”

“It’s okay.” Zhang Li sat down across from him and lifted his eyes toward the stage.

Ali began to sing. It was a very distinctive ethnic style, rough, primitive, carrying the sacredness of remote antiquity. Gu Deng could not understand the lyrics, but he could feel the emotions inside them.

Zhang Li told Gu Deng that it was Inuit, and that the lyrics were a tribute to nature and to the ancestral polar bears. Many Inuit people believed in shamanism and thought that all things possessed spirits. In the myths and legends of various tribes, polar bears, whales, and ravens had all once been their ancestors.

This should not have been inside a bar, Gu Deng thought. A singing voice like this should have been sounding across the wilderness, flying up into the sky.

When the second song began, Smith came over and asked Zhang Li, “When are you setting out?”

“In a week.”

“You’re really going to follow the whole route? That’s nearly a thousand li of road. It’s too dangerous. I’m really worried about you.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“…Sigh, forget it. You’re the kind of person who won’t easily change what you’ve decided. Take care of yourself. I hope we can still see each other this summer.”

The music onstage became the background noise of their conversation. Even the people closest to Ali could not fully receive the emotions she was trying to convey.

Gu Deng lowered the brim of his cap and drained the drink in his cup in one go. Smith got up to mix him a fresh drink, but Zhang Li shook his head and said sparkling water for Gu Deng would be enough.

“I want alcohol.” Gu Deng looked up as he spoke.

Smith looked toward Zhang Li, and Zhang Li said, “He’s drunk. Sparkling water is enough.”

Gu Deng glanced at Zhang Li and said nothing more.

Smith came back with the sparkling water and started talking with Zhang Li again about the latest news regarding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil development plan. Both of them were very pessimistic. Oilfield development would alter the surrounding ecology and destroy wildlife habitats.

From their conversation, Gu Deng gradually learned what Zhang Li was about to do. Every spring, Alaska’s caribou herds set out from the southern foot of the Brooks Range and migrate north to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Year after year, that migration had existed for tens of thousands of years. If no outside force interfered, it might have gone on forever.

But now, this migration route that had existed for tens of thousands of years was about to vanish completely because of oilfield development. Zhang Li planned to record the final migration route of this herd. That was what Smith and Zhang Li had just been discussing.

Gu Deng looked up at Zhang Li, trying to find some emotion on his cool, unreadable face. But Zhang Li’s expression remained light and faint. Compared with the emotionally overflowing Smith, he seemed almost excessively calm.

And yet Zhang Li was going to record the caribou migration.

The work would not earn money. It would even consume huge amounts of money, energy, and effort. Not to mention how difficult the journey was. One small mistake could cost him his life.

What kind of person would come up with an idea like that, and then actually be capable of carrying it through? Gu Deng looked at Zhang Li with some puzzlement.

“What is it?” Zhang Li asked.

“Did you take this?” Gu Deng looked at the poster of the polar bear mother and cub blackened by oil.

Smith was curious. “How did you know?”

“Instinct,” Gu Deng said.

Smith started talking again about the Arctic oil development plan. His build was as sturdy as a bear’s, but his personality was sentimental, and his tear threshold was extremely low. He rambled on and on about how, if it were not for his work and family, he would have wanted to go with Zhang Li too, to witness this final migration.

Zhang Li clinked cups with him and drank all his water in one go.

After Smith cried for a while, his younger brother called him away, leaving only Gu Deng and Zhang Li behind.

Another song started onstage. By the time the third song came around, the band’s true level finally revealed itself. Other than the first song, which had been barely listenable, everything afterward had rough arrangements, was all over the place, and was hard to describe in a single sentence.

But Ali was still singing, and the other band members were serious too, even though there were not many people truly appreciating their work.

“Does it have any meaning?” Gu Deng said suddenly.

“What?” Zhang Li asked.

“You recording the migration route of the caribou, what meaning does that have?” Gu Deng lifted his head and stared at Zhang Li. A streak of ferocity suddenly surfaced in his dead, lifeless eyes. “Even if you record it, can you change the current situation? Can you stop any of this from happening?”

That was almost deliberately picking a fight. If it had been someone with a worse temper, they probably would already have been arguing with Gu Deng by now.

But Zhang Li lowered his eyes and seriously thought about it.

“I don’t know either,” Zhang Li said. “Maybe not. Maybe that’s exactly why I want to record it.”

Gu Deng had only been venting his temper, but Zhang Li actually started discussing meaning with him in earnest.

Suddenly Gu Deng could not keep talking. He opened his mouth, then lowered his head and buried his face in his palms. “Sorry, just now I…”

Zhang Li had obviously done nothing wrong, yet he had provoked him indiscriminately and made the other man bear the weight of his foul mood.

Zhang Li shook his head and said it was fine, but Gu Deng still did not withdraw his gaze.

He looked at Zhang Li and vaguely sensed that there was a rare kind of tolerance in him. He did not talk at length, but he knew many things, and he could also handle thorny problems. He did not speak much, but he was not cold. He neither pried into people’s privacy, nor spoke with false intimacy after only shallow acquaintance. When Gu Deng was with him, he had the feeling of being understood.

Gu Deng said sorry again, then took his glass of water and moved to the table farthest away from Zhang Li.

Smith came over carrying a huge platter of grilled sausages and smoked salmon. Seeing that Gu Deng had chosen the most remote table in the corner, he asked curiously, “Why is he sitting over there?”

Zhang Li lifted his eyes and looked over. Gu Deng reached up and tugged down the brim of his cap, as though he wanted to draw a complete line between himself and them.

“Should we call him over to eat?” Smith asked again.

“No.”

“Then should I bring him a plate?”

“No.”

In Gu Deng’s current state, he probably did not want to eat here either.

And Gu Deng really could not eat. He did not even want to look at Zhang Li one more time. He did not like being around people like Zhang Li. Those people were high-energy, high-efficiency, goal-driven like warriors, which only made him seem all the darker, all the lower, crawling along the ground by comparison.

Gu Deng tipped back his head and finished the water, then tucked two bills under the glass and got ready to leave. But just then, someone suddenly sat down in front of him. “Excuse me, are you Gu Deng?”

A very pretty girl, young, polite, full of life.

“No,” Gu Deng said. “I’m Gu Deng’s older brother, Gu Huo.”

“Huh?” The girl looked slightly dazed. “Really?”

“Nope.” Gu Deng laughed. “Do you want an autograph or a photo? You can have both if you want.”

“Ahhh, I want both then!” The girl fumbled with her hands and hurriedly turned on the front-facing camera, then leaned in beside Gu Deng and took a photo together with him.

After taking the picture, she started rummaging through her handbag, but unfortunately even after turning the whole thing upside down, she still could not find a single sheet of paper.

Gu Deng picked up one of the band posters and asked, “Can I sign it here?”

“Yes, yes.” The girl nodded repeatedly. “Can you write ‘To Shanshan’?”

“Which Shan?”

“The Shan from coral.”

Gu Deng wrote it down, then drew a little smiley face after it.

The girl was so excited she could not sit still. She immediately took a picture and wanted to share it with her friends, but just before sending it, she hesitated and asked, “Oh, right, I saw your Weibo post from before… Since you’re here now, should I keep it secret for you?”

“If you can, thank you,” Gu Deng said.

“Of course. Please don’t be so polite.” The girl immediately turned off her screen, then added, “I’ll post it after I go back to China. I promise I won’t reveal even a tiny bit of your whereabouts!”

“Mm. Thank you.”

The girl sat there clutching her phone for a while. In the end, she could not resist asking, “Are you really going into retirement?”

Gu Deng did not answer.

The girl still wanted to ask more, but her phone rang. She answered the call, said goodbye to Gu Deng, and hurried out.

Gu Deng also got up to say goodbye to Ali, then returned the baseball cap to Zhang Li, pulled up the hood of his shell jacket, and left the bar.

The air outside was cold. At the street corner, several teenagers had two girls hemmed in at the center. One of them was the girl who had just asked Gu Deng for an autograph.

Gu Deng pulled the zipper of his shell jacket all the way up, then walked straight into the middle of the group. “What’s going on?”

One of the boys looked up and glared at him, his tone aggressive. “Get lost. This has nothing to do with you.”

The girl looked at him pleadingly.

Gu Deng looked at her and said in an impatient tone, “Are you coming or not? Everyone’s waiting for you.”

The girl instantly caught on and nodded at once. “We’ll come over with you right away!”

Her friend looked completely baffled. The girl slowly shook her head, then pulled her behind Gu Deng.

Gu Deng shifted sideways to let the two of them go first. Only after making sure the teenagers were not following did he turn and go back into the bar.

“Thank you so much,” the girl said first. “Those people were trying to force us to buy weed. It’s a good thing we ran into you.”

“Public safety abroad isn’t like it is back home. Be careful when you go out,” Gu Deng said.

The two girls nodded repeatedly and thanked him again and again.

Gu Deng turned to leave. When he reached the door, the long-haired girl ran after him, slipped a note into his palm, and told him he absolutely had to read it.

The bar lighting was dim. Gu Deng pinched the note between his fingers, returned to the car, and opened it.

[I don’t know what you’ve been through, but no matter what, Little Night Lights will always support you! Even if you never make music again, that’s okay. Take good care of your health, and don’t put too much pressure on yourself!]

Little Night Lights was what his fans called themselves. At every concert, countless Little Night Lights would connect into a sea of stars. What Gu Deng liked most was the part when the lights went out and he and the fans sang together in unaccompanied chorus.

That feeling was like standing in a dark universe. He stood alone onstage, watching points of starlight slowly light up one by one. Behind every single star was one fervent, beating heart.

Gu Deng loved concerts. He loved face-to-face emotional connection with his fans. To him, concerts were something very romantic. Tens of thousands of people who had originally never known one another, yet because of one concert, they resonated with each other and, for a brief three hours, experienced the same sadness and happiness.

At his best, Gu Deng had once held nearly a hundred concerts in a single year. His concerts were not only numerous, they were also high in quality, widely acknowledged as an industry benchmark.

His peers told him to stop pushing so hard, and some Little Night Lights worried that Gu Deng was being squeezed dry by his management company and exhausting himself too early. But later they realized that Gu Deng was genuinely enjoying it. He was not being forced. He simply truly loved it. The most excited he had ever been, he had improvised for two extra hours and answered every single encore his fans called for.

That concert had been met with enormous praise, but it had also caused a series of aftereffects. Not only had the subway been delayed, it had also put immense pressure on security. Gu Deng himself had been physically drained and burning with a high fever. His manager nagged at him for several days and explicitly forbade him from privately extending the show again in the future.

But at that time, he had really been happy. He loved music, loved creating, loved facing the Little Night Lights in person. Only during those times did he feel vivid and alive, as though he were truly living.

But at some point, that feeling had gradually grown distant. His fans still continued to expect things from him, but Gu Deng himself could almost no longer remember what that feeling had been like back then. So he began to avoid it, even deliberately avoiding thinking about those scenes from the past.

He had not produced any work in four years, and had thought everyone must already have forgotten him, until he ran into his own fan again…

It was only one short line, yet Gu Deng read it over and over several times. Then he tucked away the note, went to the bar and palmed two beer bottles, stuffed them into his pockets, took a mask out of the car and put it on, then followed those teenagers into the alley.

Calling them a group was an exaggeration. There were really only four of them, all of them thin, dispirited-looking, making trouble before they had even fully grown up.

“We shouldn’t have wasted so much time talking to them in the first place. Those two Chinese girls are obviously rich, they’re carrying Hermès. We don’t even need to sell them anything, we can just grab their bags.”

“You’ve got a point. How about we go back and try?”

Clunk, clunk…

Glass beer bottles rolled into the alley, followed by a man in a shell jacket.

“What do you want?” One of the boys stood up and strode aggressively toward him.

Gu Deng pulled out a beer bottle.

Two minutes later, the four teenagers ran out of the alley, cursing nonstop.

Gu Deng tossed the beer bottle into a trash can, then suddenly felt utterly bored by all of it.

Meaningless. It was all completely meaningless. Standing on a strange street in a foreign country, Gu Deng was suddenly struck by an immense wave of desolation.

He had thrown everything aside and come to Alaska. He had seen whales, gone to the Arctic, and had even witnessed the aurora flickering in the night sky. He had attained absolute freedom.

So why was he still unhappy?

When Gu Deng returned to the parking space, there was one more familiar figure beside the car. Zhang Li was standing there quietly in a black shell jacket.

Gu Deng went around Zhang Li and tried to get into the car. The other man braced a hand against the car door. “You’ve been drinking. You can’t drive.”

“So you saw all of it?” Gu Deng asked instead of answering.

“I saw it,” Zhang Li said.

“You saw it and still didn’t leave? Aren’t you afraid I’ll hit you too?”

“Get out of the car first.”

Gu Deng could not be bothered to argue with him, so he compromised. “I’ll call for a designated driver, all right?”

He had only just taken out his phone when Zhang Li was already sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Hey!”

“Where are you going?” Zhang Li fastened his seat belt and turned to look back at him. “I’ll take you there.”

Gu Deng rolled his eyes, got into the front passenger seat unwillingly, and went back to that same wilted, listless state. Leaning one hand against the window, he turned his face toward the darkness outside. “I don’t know. Just drive wherever.”

“Name a place.”

“I said just drive wherever.” Gu Deng’s tone turned cold and hard, already on the verge of losing patience.

But Zhang Li asked again, “Then what do you want to do right now?”

“Do you not understand human language?” Gu Deng sat up and raised his voice. “I told you to just drive wherever. If you’re not going to drive, then get the hell out.”

Zhang Li said nothing more, but he also did not start the car.

Gu Deng reached out to open the door, but the door did not move at all. Zhang Li had actually locked it.

Gu Deng threw himself back into the seat, pulled the hood of his shell jacket down over his eyes, and said, “Get lost.”

The man in the next seat did not move. Gu Deng finally lost all patience. He grabbed Zhang Li by the collar and asked almost viciously, “Zhang Li, what exactly are you trying to do?”

Toy with him, expose him, watch him make a fool of himself?

Gu Deng had prepared himself for the worst, but when he lowered his head, what he saw was a pair of clear eyes.

Gu Deng had seen all kinds of eyes, but never one as simple as Zhang Li’s. This kind of simplicity was not the childish ignorance of someone untouched by the world. Zhang Li’s simplicity was the straightforwardness of the wild, like an animal of the wilderness, open, direct, and pure.

At a single glance, Gu Deng understood that all the suspicions he had just been entertaining had no basis whatsoever. This man simply wanted to know where he was going, and wanted to drive him there, nothing more.

Someone else was trying to help him out of kindness. Gu Deng should have let it end there and obediently given the address of a hotel. But instead, a mean, vindictive urge rose in his heart. Who told Zhang Li to play the saint? Who told him to meddle?

“So wherever I want to go, you’ll take me?” Gu Deng asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I want to go see whales,” Gu Deng said. “The kind that swim in the ocean, not parasitized, completely free whales.”