The Falling List

The list appeared on a gloomy morning, like a judgment handed down from the sky, silently landing on the principal's desk. A thin sheet of A4 paper, printed with more than a dozen names, all students of the school. Behind each name, in red ink, two startling words were marked: "Fallen to death."

The principal rubbed his sleepy eyes, thinking it was a prank by some student, but those bright red words, "Fallen to death," like two crawling insects, wriggled on his retinas, refusing to go away. He immediately summoned all the school leaders for an emergency meeting.

In the conference room, the atmosphere was suffocatingly tense. The first name on the list, Li Ming, had already jumped to his death last Friday. His parents were making a scene at the school, hysterically accusing the school of negligence and suspecting that their child had suffered school bullying. And now, this list, like a time bomb, could detonate even greater panic at any moment.

"Investigate! We must investigate thoroughly!" The principal slammed his fist on the table, making the teacup lids rattle. "Find out the source of this list, find out the situation of each student, find out... find out everything!"

An investigation team was quickly formed, led by the Dean of Students, Wang. Wang was a middle-aged man with thinning hair, always wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, behind which were always a pair of tired and bewildered eyes. Like a wound-up machine, he began to mechanically execute the principal's instructions: interviewing students, visiting parents, retrieving surveillance footage, checking archives...

Days passed, but the investigation yielded no progress. Some of the students on the list were taciturn, some were anxious, and some showed a puzzling ease. The parents' accounts varied; some were convinced that their children had been driven to death, some believed that their children were psychologically fragile, and some... simply said nothing, just silently shedding tears.

Wang increasingly felt an invisible pressure, like a giant net, tightly wrapping him. He began to suffer from insomnia, tossing and turning in bed all night. He dreamed that he was standing on the roof of a tall building, and the students on the list jumped from his side one by one, like a flock of birds with broken wings, falling into endless darkness.

He began to doubt the authenticity of the list, to doubt whether all this was just an absurd farce. He even began to doubt himself, to doubt whether he still had the ability to investigate the truth.

A month later, the second name on the list, Zhang Hua, also fell to his death.

Panic spread through the campus like a plague. Parents demanded to transfer their children, teachers were trembling with fear, and students were silent as cicadas in winter.

Wang was once again called to the principal's office. The principal did not scold him, but just handed him a cup of strong tea, and then said in a tone of near despair: "Old Wang, tell me, what on earth is going on? Have we... have we done something wrong?"

Wang held the teacup, his hand trembling slightly. He didn't know how to answer the principal's question. He only felt that he was in a huge maze, no matter how he walked, he could not find the exit.

He remembered Borges' library, an infinitely looping, endless labyrinth. And he was the librarian lost among the bookshelves, never able to find the book that could explain everything.

The list continued, like a relentless curse, devouring young lives one by one. Wang did not know who the next falling name would be. He also did not know when this absurd tragedy would end. He only knew that he had to continue the investigation, even if the investigation itself, like the falling, was meaningless and endless. The only thing he could do was mechanically record, like K in Kafka's novels, eternally walking on the road to find the castle, knowing that it could not be reached, but unable to stop. This, perhaps, is the whole meaning of existence, absurd, yet so real that it is heartbreaking.