The God of Luck Appeared to Me~

5,345 characters2009.06.09

The situation was like this:

After being hit by a car last night, I spent today resting at home during the day. Most of my body has basically recovered, except that my right hand still lacks the strength to twist bottle caps open, my legs and knees are slightly sore, and the muscles in my arms are weak and depleted…

For lunch I ordered takeout. For dinner I had originally planned to go downstairs and solve it with a 7-Eleven or Yoshinoya as usual. I casually threw on a long-sleeved outer layer before heading down, as I always do—this clothes is rather hot, but for a trip of less than a minute it is actually better at keeping you cool. Today, however, I inadvertently put on socks (this was a superfluous move; after all, for such a short walk I would have been fine without socks), so after reaching downstairs I had a sudden impulse (to avoid having worn the socks for nothing?) and decided to go have the bike repaired today after all.

So I dragged my still faintly painful legs toward Zhongguancun Street and found the bike I had parked yesterday at the intersection. I noticed that the front wheel had become twisted and misshapen, the rear wheel was also slightly deformed, and the right handlebar was bent completely out of shape, though from a distance it still looked more or less intact… So I half-dragged and half-carried the bike to the repair shop in the School Five Plaza at Tsinghua. By then my hands had already gone limp and I had reached the point where I could not raise my arms. But the repair master said it could not be fixed; they didn’t have a 28-inch wheel there to replace it with. So I tried to push the bike out to the west gate to look for another repair shop, but then I thought that I was leaving for Chengze Garden tomorrow anyway, so I might as well come back tomorrow…

I parked the bike in front of Wumei, went down to buy a few books, and after coming up and finishing dinner I headed back. Outside the school, across from the south gate, I found a bike stall. I casually asked whether they could repair it, and the master readily said yes, so I dragged my already depleted legs back to Wumei to get the bike again…

At that moment something marvelous happened. As I was pushing the bike—the front wheel having long since been kicked hard enough by me that it could only barely roll while making strange noises—toward the south gate, I had just walked into School Five Plaza when I looked up and saw a rainbow spanning the sky overhead (it should have been above the bathhouse), with at least a third of a circle clearly visible, and even the outer halo discernible.

Before, although I had seen rainbows, I had only ever seen one “foot” of the rainbow—that little column of light whose shape you can’t quite tell is a straight line or an arc. This was truly the first time I had seen a semicircular rainbow in person. Truly, “when the old front door breaks, who knows it won’t be a blessing” (塞翁失马焉知非福) indeed.

After seeing the rainbow I almost didn’t stop at all, but instead sped forward, even though I clearly knew the scientific principle of rainbows, knew that a rainbow is only the refraction and reflection of sunlight, and knew that walking forward would not bring me any closer to it. But my body seemed not yet to have understood these principles. I seemed involuntarily to want to draw closer, to go around the bathhouse and look at a more complete rainbow. But after I crossed School Five Plaza, I could no longer see the rainbow in its entirety. After searching for a while through the gaps in the leaves, in the end I could only see that little stretch of light again.

I had taken out my phone at the very first moment, of course, but it was only when I saw a group of people near the pine grove taking pictures with cameras and phones that I remembered my own phone could also take photos, and thus I missed the chance to capture that complete rainbow. Still, that hardly counts as a loss, because even if I had photographed that scene, it really would not have looked all that marvelous. The wonder of a rainbow lies not only in its own beauty. More importantly, it lies in its sudden appearance, and in my having happened to catch a glimpse of it. The same is true of meteors, solar eclipses, and so on: merely looking at photos and videos of them would not be all that astonishing. Only the instant they are actually happening, right there before your eyes, is the most wondrous of all. In that moment, both scientific principles and bodily pain are cast to the back of the mind, and the heart holds only that rainbow and certain other equally beautiful things. I did not stop to look, and that does not deserve regret; that first inadvertent glance was already enough.

At last I got to the bike shop, where I was told the repair would take about an hour. During that time I went back to Wumei and walked the same route again. The rainbow was, of course, gone, but the sunlight and leaves were extraordinarily vivid. Unfortunately, I was truly moving with difficulty, so I didn’t wander further toward Weiming Lake. I passed the time at Fengrushong along the way, then picked up the bike and went home.

The repaired bike was still a bit crooked at the handlebars, and the front brake was somewhat unreliable, but it could still be ridden as usual. The cost was 72 yuan. For such a small loss to have bought these wonderful experiences of the past two days was really more than worth it.

June 9, 2009