LCP Ch 2

He chose a photo to post on WeChat Moments, and someone he knew asked in confusion below: Isn’t this dog originally yours? Chi An tilted his phone slightly toward himself and quickly deleted the comment.

Chi An’s psychological unhealthiness had started very early, tracing back to when he had just come of age. One day, he went to look for a friend at the swimming pool and saw him in the locker room, being pinned against the wall by the throat by a swim team member named Sun Liang. “Aren’t you just cheap?!” Sun Liang yelled furiously, bruising his friend’s ribs as he squeezed.

His friend looked terrified, whimpering softly in what sounded like pain, so after calling for help, Chi An rushed over to save him. Before long, both the police and parents arrived. His friend began to scream loudly and sharply—Chi An realized that this might actually be what his terrified screams sounded like.

The whole incident caused quite a stir, for the shocking reason that Sun Liang’s violence hadn’t been bullying at all. Sun Liang was expelled, his friend moved away, and Sun Liang’s girlfriend was left with no choice but to block Chi An at the intersection every day: “I didn’t know at first! We were fine, why did you have to expose everything?” She threw a cloying milk drink all over Chi An, leaving him dry-heaving in the sour reek of milk.

A month later, Chi An ran into the friend who had transferred schools. The boy spent all day hiding on the rooftop of a high-rise residential building, pointing at Chi An and cursing incoherently: “I was willing! He likes it this way… Don’t you get it? Why didn’t he hit anyone else and only hit me? You ruined everything!” Chi An was thoroughly shocked and asked, “Were you two in a relationship?” His friend’s eyes turned red, and he used a louder voice to mask his vulnerability: “It was just to satisfy a physical need! Don’t you get it? That kind of thing is just to satisfy a physical need.”

Another month passed, and the friend fell from the rooftop to his death.

The last words a person leaves for another can be as light as a feather, or as heavy as a mountain. But “that kind of thing is just to satisfy a physical need”—this sentence was far too strange. It was impossible to talk about its weight because it lacked a subject. “That kind of thing,” “just,” “satisfy”—whose light, trivial need was actually being satisfied? When his friend fell, whose rules was he using a heavy life to cater to?

Chi An realized he hadn’t just witnessed violence, but his friend’s act of pretending to enjoy it amid the violence: someone was flaying him open with a steel wire, yet his friend lifted his face, looking as proud as a violin being played. But the audience for this performance shouldn’t have been me, the still naive Chi An reached a twisted conclusion. It had to be that way; that was why everyone said Chi An had ruined everything—if he had never spectated, the tragedy wouldn’t have happened.

Whether awake or asleep, Chi An suffered from endless nightmares. He was engulfed by a massive, inescapable guilt because he simply couldn’t figure it out. He couldn’t understand his friend, Sun Liang, the girlfriend, or himself… The only thing he could try to understand was pain. It was pain that bound all of this together.

Chi An picked a Tuesday. Wearing a face mask, he sat in a cram school classroom waiting for it to empty out, planning to align a stapler with his earlobe and press down. After nearly an hour, a boy wearing glasses sitting diagonally in front of him still hadn’t left. Annoyed by this intruder in his nightmare, Chi An extended his arm and tapped the boy’s shoulder: “Why haven’t you gone home yet?” he asked impatiently.

The boy turned his head slightly to glance at him: “I haven’t finished this test paper yet.”

“Then can’t you finish it at home?”

“It’s too noisy at home.”

“But I want to staple my ear here.” At the time, Chi An’s hair was still very dark and short, making his ears look even paler by contrast. Using childish words, he intentionally and fiercely pressed the stapler once, letting a staple pop out: “It’s going to be very bloody. I’m the one who got splashed with milk in public a while ago. My friend was Xize—he fell to his death because of me recently, did you know that? Hurry up and leave, stay away from me.”

The boy put down his pen and turned around. Chi An noticed he was very thin; the nose pads completely blocked the bridge of his nose, and the thick lenses made his eyes look even smaller: “I don’t know you. There are too many test papers and I can’t finish them. I don’t have time to look at anything else.”

Then he touched his neck and added, “Sorry about that.”

Chi An felt irritated listening to him; he only wanted to use pain to put an end to his nightmare, so he didn’t reply.

Just then, the boy looked at Chi An’s fingers, which were resting on the stapler and rubbing back and forth. After thinking for a moment, he said, “If you’re really in a hurry, how about I help you?”

Chi An burst out laughing: “You help me?”

“Yeah. Close your eyes.”

The boy’s voice sounded like it had just broken, uttering words like an incantation that logically shouldn’t come true. But Chi An was just so tired; he hadn’t slept well in so long and his mind was extremely frail, so much so that he inexplicably did as he was told.

He closed his eyes, hearing the scraping sound of the boy’s chair moving, footsteps, and some noises from the stapler. Then the boy placed the stapler in his hand, covered his hand with his own, and pressed the cold metal against his earlobe—

“Click.” The boy voiced the sound effect for him, applying force together with Chi An’s hand, but no staple went through. Chi An opened his eyes.

The boy had put the removed staples on the desk. He had simply used an empty stapler—no longer capable of piercing him—to gently squeeze his earlobe, advising him earnestly: “It already hurts like this, so don’t staple it through.”

Liar. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all, yet Chi An, who had gained nothing, actually felt a strange sense of satisfaction. The boy’s hand was still covering his hand; he felt his world magically quiet down as the things entangling him dispersed, letting out a gentle breath like a survivor after a catastrophe.

Chi An looked up at the only person who had ever brought him peace. He still didn’t understand what pain was, but he now knew what not pain felt like.

⋆⋆⋆

The name written on the boy’s test paper was Liang Ce, and his class wasn’t on the same floor as Chi An’s. Liang Ce said that if he still wanted to get his ears stapled, he could accompany Chi An to get his ears pierced after graduation.

However, Chi An never found another chance to talk to him after that. Chi An went abroad before graduation.

While studying at Cornell, Chi An began to crave excitement. Meeting Liang Ce had been like an anesthetic applied to a wound; once time passed, it naturally wore off. He used every vacation to go bungee jumping, skydiving, doing parkour on rooftops, and shooting at firing ranges. He yearned for the sensation of being injured or having sore muscles, because only when exhausted by pain could he fall into a peaceful sleep.

Obsessively, night after night, Chi An thought: It’s all my fault. I deserve to suffer pain in my friend’s place; I should be the one pretending to enjoy it on his behalf. So he decided to taint the act normal people do for pleasure with pain, using only tools on himself to achieve his goal. Over time, his reliance on pain morphed into a reliance on tools. Once, he used them so hard that he fell out of bed onto the floor. The bruises on his face were discovered by a friend, who took him to see a psychologist at the university clinic. The doctor said he had OCD.

It sounded light, almost like a joke, but it was actually so excruciating. It took Chi An many years to get better.

After starting medication, Chi An genuinely went through a period of listlessness. He tried to relearn what pleasure was, but he couldn’t learn it at all because he had no point of reference. Chi An had only ever seen one kind of intimate relationship, where one party inflicted violence and the other endured pain, both claiming it was to “satisfy a need”—Chi An found it horrifying. Intimacy sounded like a game that only pursued the outcome while ignoring whether the two people lived or died in the process; as long as they reached the end, the process could be painful; as long as they grew old together, the process could be trash.

“It’s not like that at all. You’re thinking about it all wrong—that’s not what intimacy is,” a close female friend had once taught him word for word. “Holding someone you like feels amazing. It’s like magic—you should try it.”

“But why hold each other? What’s the goal? If the goal is to satisfy a need, I can do that myself.”

“There is no goal. Holding each other is just for the sake of holding each other.”

Chi An nodded slowly, but he didn’t truly understand at all. To him, love wasn’t metaphysics—it was science. Touching here makes you grit your teeth; touching there makes you want to cry. There should be an unromantic explanation found for all of it.

Yet just one hour after reuniting with Liang Ce, the unromantic Chi An stood across from him, performing a checkup on the Border Collie under his gaze. At that moment, Liang Ce was separated from him by a table and hadn’t touched him anywhere, yet Chi An’s hands trembled when he put on his gloves. This time, he couldn’t find a reason.

To cover it up, he could only stroke the Collie’s chin, because when his hands were still, his racing heartbeat was far too obvious.

Later, when passing out flyers with Liang Ce, Chi An used his freezing red nose tip to coax a scarf out of Liang Ce. He slept holding the scarf, imagining using it to tie Liang Ce’s hands behind his back—if Chi An didn’t allow it, Liang Ce wouldn’t be able to pull them out.

This was his first time imagining the process of intimacy. There was no end result. Nothing was resolved. Just a single, stingy fragment, yet it brought Chi An satisfaction. He felt so satisfied that he fell asleep.

⋆⋆⋆

In a week of seven days, Chi An and Liang Ce met ten times.

On Monday of the second week, they were walking the dog in the underground garage. Chi An said it had been so cold lately, and taking a taxi from the hospital to his place was too close while walking was too far—when would it warm up? Liang Ce said tomorrow.

“Really? Did you check the weather forecast?” Chi An asked.

“No, but I can pick you up tomorrow. It’s very warm in my car,” Liang Ce replied.

So on Tuesday evening, as Chi An walked out of the hospital’s main entrance, he saw Liang Ce’s car parked on the only stretch of road without standing water, allowing him to step onto dry asphalt as he opened the car door.

Liang Ce had changed into a camel-hair coat today, with a black sheer turtleneck peeking out from under a brown shirt, faintly revealing the contour of his chest. It really was very warm inside his car.

There are two kinds of men in this world: one who compliments the person he likes on wearing something nice, and another who dresses nicely to see the person he likes. Liang Ce clearly belonged to the latter. He wore clothes that maintained a sense of distance, yet sprayed a perfume that made people want to draw near. Now look at what happened—Chi An couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes, couldn’t stop breathing in his scent, and now even had to listen to him speak: “Put on your seatbelt. We’ll be there in 20 minutes.” Chi An thought to himself that he had already arrived.

Chi An pulled out the seatbelt, fiddled with it for a moment, and turned his head for help: “The seatbelt doesn’t seem to click in.”

“Let me see.” Liang Ce leaned over, looking down at the seatbelt—it was completely fine. He looked up at Chi An—Chi An was… so pretty.

Liang Ce looked down at the seatbelt again. He decided the seatbelt couldn’t be fine.

Using one hand, he pressed the seatbelt down, let it pop back up, pressed it down again, and let it pop up once more.

Then he only raised his eyes without lifting his head, staying right at that close distance: “It really doesn’t seem to click in.”

At this moment, as long as Chi An blinked, his eyelashes could almost tangle into Liang Ce’s loose hair—they were so close. Chi An realized he wasn’t the only one thinking this way; he realized he wasn’t the only one who wanted it to be like this.

Chi An covered Liang Ce’s hand with his own, just like when he was eighteen, pressing down: “Click.” This time, it wasn’t a voiced sound effect. The seatbelt straightened out like a taut electrocardiogram.

“It’s buckled,” he said ever so softly.

And just like that, with his palm pressed against Liang Ce’s knuckles and his thumb resting on Liang Ce’s tiger mouth (the web of his hand), he smiled as if nothing had happened.