Chapter Text
The sky is bleak, and all Minghao sees is black. Black shoes, black robes. The sky is crying and so is he.
The funeral procession leads him inside the church, and somehow, the rain doesn’t stop, but the skies clear just enough for the sun to shine through. The modest coffin lays amidst a flowerbed, a few steps away from the pulpit. Right above the coffin, a four glass panels let traces of light stream through resplendently like pieces of the puzzle that make up the high ceiling of the church. It illuminates his grandfather’s body, and Minghao thinks, it’s the healthiest his grandfather has looked all his life – which is ironic, because he’s not alive anymore. The late Mr. Xu’s dark glasses are placed at the feet of his coffin.
Minghao likes to think it’s a way to say his grandfather’s set free from from a life of darkness, and now he’s going to see everything without a shadow of visual impairment holding him back.
“Mr Xu lived a long life of peace and solitude, and at 96, he has departed from us. Today, we-“
The eulogies go in and out of Minghao’s ears; relatives who know close to nothing about his grandfather describe his solitary lifestyle superficially, force their eyes to moisten and squeeze out a tear, then proceed to choke out the rest of their rehearsed speech.
He closes his eyes and thinks of afternoons where sunlight streams through the windows, too, but it hits the floor and makes the kitchen look like it’s gone through the Sepia filter on Instagram. His grandfather’s singing a Jackie Cheung song, and Minghao’s practicing his wushu moves with an imaginary partner; six-year old him thinks he needs to practice his五步拳 more to impress his instructor the next day; eighty-year old grandpa watches him with a crinkled smile on his face and Minghao doesn’t know what he’s thinking, but he hopes his grandpa’s impressed, too.
Someone tugs at his sleeves and he’s steered towards a queue. Everyone’s lining up to pay their last respects, doing the customary U-turn by the coffin that may mean something to a select few, and to most people at the ceremony, nothing at all.
His mother goes before him, leaving a bouquet of lilies by the casket that she had bought after eons of research – he’d used her phone yesterday and the first entry in her search history was “acceptable funeral flowers”. He doesn’t blame her, honestly.
When Minghao himself meets his grandfather during the open casket ceremony, time seems to stop.
He holds his grandfather’s hand, and it almost creeps him out how it’s still warm. Minghao looks at his grandpa’s closed, serene eyes, because there’s nothing to fear. He wants to apologize for leaving China – leaving him - when he turned eight, he wants to say so much but he can’t. The people behind him are at a polite distance, but Minghao senses they’re getting impatient.
He’s about to leave, when the hand in the coffin tightens its grip on Minghao’s own.
Holy-
The closed eyes of serenity? They open.
This isn’t real
Minghao’s head fills with white noise, and all he can think of is that the hired mortician for this funeral did a too-stellar job of restructuring his grandpa’s face because oh god he just smiled oh my god he’s mouthing words out this is not real this is-
When the figure on the coffin’s mouthed its last words beyond death, the eyes close once more with an air of finality.
Minghao’s mouth opens and shuts repeatedly, words unable to form themselves as he looks towards the crowd like a fish out of water. He’s losing his shit, he’s losing his mind and-
Blinding light flashes before Minghao and he thinks he feels like he’s set on fire and the eyes of his grandfather’s close. Minghao thinks he hears glass shattering from above, he thinks he smells something burning and then he doesn’t even think anymore because the world is now black and so is his mind.
When Minghao wakes up, there’s more than a dozen people in the operating theatre, and someone drops a clipboard.
Someone screams. Someone cries. His mother’s bounding towards him in happiness and Minghao peers at the dropped jaws of the medical personnel.
The arms of his mother wrap fiercely around him, and she’s sobbing. All he can make out of the blubbering mess is “I thought you were gone”.
After his mother lets go, Minghao gingerly picks up the clipboard.
It’s a death certificate.
Name: Xu Minghao
Time of death: 6:28 p.m, 30 April, 2016
Age at time of death: 21 years and 7 months
“I died?” Minghao asks, and he’s so, so lost.
But I just woke up?
He peers at the digital clock at the front of the operating theatre. 7:31 p.m.
A doctor smiles shakily, holding a hand out for the clipboard. “I guess we won’t be needing this anymore.”
“What happened?”
“The heart rate monitor was became flat for the past hour, and then suddenly it spiked. You were legally dead. For an hour. But it’s alright, there’s been Near-Death Experiences or NDEs all over the world before, so I guess fate wanted to give you a second chance.”
Later, Minghao learns that lightning had struck him during the open-casket ceremony, causing the glass panels from above to shatter and the funeral procession was stopped. He had been rushed to the A&E, with a 3% chance of survival.
“However, you were a bizarre case. Lightning strikes would cause great damage – burns, extreme haemorrhage, - especially with a direct hit like yours. But the only thing that left enough trace of a lightning strike injury was the Lichtenberg figure that you have, from your right wrist to your chest and stomach.”
“Lichtenberg figure?” Minghao had asked Doctor Wang.
“You know, the red, branching electric discharge pattern across your body. It’s like, the path the lightning took through your capillaries.”
“Oh, the lightning flower? How long will it last?”
“For most people, a few hours or a few days.”
-
It’s been two weeks.
Two weeks since the whole bizarre shit fest, two weeks since the funeral, two weeks since his whole born again ordeal. The Lichtenberg figure is still imprinted deep into his skin, showing no signs of going away any time.
He does not feel like Jesus Christ after resurrection. Xu Minghao is now mugging till his soul is no more in his newly rented apartment, labelling his skeletal kit and cramming as many biological terms as he can into his puny brain. Tomorrow he will shake hands with the dead again and he sure as hell is not going to screw it up.
When he’s tired, he’ll drink the horrid 3-in-1 Instamix coffee, two packets concentrated in one cup. When he’s hungry, he’ll eat the leftover macaroni from yesterday. When he’s discouraged, well, he’ll look up.
He’ll look up, as in, he’ll face the wall to the right, peer at his undergraduate certificate that signifies the completion of his four year degree in forensic pathology. And then, tell himself that he’s going to slay the shit out of his next upcoming four years of his residency program – that starts tomorrow, because before the phone call from Anshan, before the funeral, before he... slept, for an hour, he had a dream, an aspiration, and nothing's going to stop him. Minghao’s lucky he gets to intern as a pathologist straight away, let alone get an internship. Some of his friends slaving away at a medical degree can’t even get one, or spend their days doing odd jobs at a clinic.
Somehow, Minghao had hoped to gain some kind of encounter with death that could give him an edge in his pathology course or his new internship, maybe an un-investigated prior-death process or perhaps a trigger response just before the last breath, but all Minghao has is a shadow of a dream – he knows something happened, something important, but he doesn’t remember what it was. It distracts him awfully as he tries to study – his mind tries to recall, but as soon as he grasps onto a figment of the memory, it slips through his fingers yet again.
He looks at the wall clock and sighs.
4:36 am. He really needs to sleep.
4:37 am. Minghao lies down, and closes his eyes.
4:38 am. Once more, he tries to recall the dream he had during the NDE, but it’s like calling an unknown number. No one picks up. (Ah, but the thing with unknown numbers, is that you'd never know if they got the call, and if they did, well... )
4:39 am. He can only recall seeing his grandfather’s face, illuminated once more by sunlight through glass panels that have yet to fall, his mouth moving awkwardly, and now, on the verge of being awake and being asleep, Minghao, trying hard to decipher the words on his lips, thinks his grandfather was saying something along the lines of “thank you for being a burden” or “thank you for easing my burden”. He hopes it’s the latter, but then, not really, because what kind of burden was grandpa carrying?
4:40 am. This is where sleep consumes him. This is where he doesn’t need to think anymore – anymore, being the next few hours of shut-eye before the world collapses before him again tomorrow – but Minghao doesn’t know that, doesn’t he?