The streets on both sides are still so familiar. This is the road I used to take to and from school.
My floor can be seen from the intersection. On a weekday afternoon, there were few people coming and going in the residential area. I looked up for a while, and when I came to my senses, Xu Tuo, who was originally beside me, was gone.
Like intuition, I found him behind a nearby tree. He thought I would panic and go looking for him nearby, and as soon as I left, he would take the opportunity to walk away.
"How old do you think I am?" I crossed my arms and cornered him. "Why do you want to go alone?"
"You know why." He pointed to the residential buildings in the distance, "—We're already near home. It's time for you to go home."
"…I'm worried that I'll be…"
"—You're not wanted." He interrupted me, "I don't need to take you away. Just go home and say you suddenly felt stressed out at work and went on a trip somewhere. If you come with me, you'll never come back."
He pushed me away and tried to leave. I grabbed his wrist and almost spoke, but the words were on the tip of my tongue and I swallowed them back.
I couldn't say that, and in the end, the moral values of the normal world stopped me. But Xu Tuo guessed what I wanted to say.
"Are you trying to say you don't care about your mother anymore and want to go with me?" he asked. "You don't care about your family, your home, your status in society anymore. You've decided to go with me?"
He spoke for me.
To ordinary people, such words are considered insane and inhumane, even worse than if I actually killed someone on the street. Humans in the bright world might forgive a murderer, but they would never forgive someone who said such words.
This is a bright society where morality governs social existence. A person's social existence can sometimes be more important than whether or not they've broken the law. Violating the moral bottom line established by human society means losing social existence. They will be relegated to the margins of society, never to be forgiven.
In other words, my willingness to abandon my family and flee with him and my being held hostage by him to flee are two completely different things.
"Once you say it, there's really no going back."
There is a word called "cold-hearted nature".
Not everyone cares about home and family, or their own social existence. Everyone is an isolated island, closed to the outside world. Through a telescope, you can only see the ordinary forest outside, but not the swamp on the island.
Some people just don't care, and can't learn to care. I don't hate my parents, but I don't mind how long I'm away from them. High school organized a farming program, requiring two weeks of living on a farm. For most of my classmates, it was their first time staying overnight away from home. We found ways to avoid the teachers' room checks and secretly call home on our phones. They asked me, "Dai Xueming, didn't you bring your phone? Aren't you going to call home?"
But I really didn't miss home. I studied abroad for several years and never experienced homesickness.
Xu Tuo's assessment of me is actually correct. If I hadn't been born into a stable and ordinary family, I might have been born into another world. My parents used their love to correct and retain me, but that was the limit.
I would think this person is beautiful, that person is ugly, and the cat is cute.
But I never thought they were worth my attention.
I just feel that the world is noisy.
Death addiction is like my methadone. It raised my emotional threshold to a very high level when I was very young, so that I can no longer have any emotional fluctuations towards people and things whose excitement threshold is lower than it.
I had no choice but to go with Xu Tuo. He was my drug, and I was addicted.
"...Take me away." I said, "I don't want anything, just take me away."
I loved walking with him, walking down the streets in the evening. Back then, I'd just started working and bought a pair of Bluetooth headphones. We'd each wear one when we walked together, the cord keeping us from being too far apart. Every time I heard OW's "Lose It," I'd sneak a glance at him.
Would he react to this song, because it's so much like us, two people strangely connected by a headphone cable?
But he didn't react. I thought he didn't understand English. Later, Xia Mo said they had lived in the United States for a few years. Xu Tuo did understand the simple lyrics of the song.
At this moment, Xu Tuo looked at me. His dark eyes seemed to be tangled with seaweed floating in the black sea.
He looked at me for a long time.
"I remember you liked that song very much," he said.
I was stunned.
He hummed a few lines: "That's the song. I don't know what it's called, but you always played it on your phone."
Xu Tuo rubbed my hair and said, you should have known at that time that our ending would be just like what the lyrics say, we would be separated sooner or later.
"Auntie is a very good person. I've lived in your house for so long, and she's taken care of me like another child. Mr. Zhou is also a good man. Although he has a quick temper, he always hopes that you can live a good life." He said, "I can't bear to take you away from them forever."
The light of the setting sun gradually faded. It was the gap between the darkening sky and the unlit streetlights. We lingered in the shadows behind the trees, neither of us knowing where to go next.
"It's so painful to never know where your children are." I heard him whisper in the darkness.
The streetlights flickered, then lit up one after another. Under the light, I felt a gleam of a knife on my neck.
"—I should have done this many years ago." Xu Tuo held the knife and pressed it against the side of my neck. "I shouldn't have kept you until today. It's like raising a cat. Once you develop feelings for it, you won't be able to bear to throw it away. It's better to suffer a short pain than a long one. It's better to leave your body to them so that they can feel at ease."
Okay.
I leaned against the wall, feeling the blade slice through my skin and the warm blood dripping down. His movements were very skillful, cutting through the skin and then turning the tip of the knife to stab it downward, precisely severing the carotid artery.
I didn't even feel the pain. The lubrication of the blood made the blade move as smoothly as a snake, avoiding the painful parts.
There were residents strolling nearby, office workers returning from get off work, and children returning from school. Occasionally, one of them would notice the two figures behind the grove, but no one was curious. Between us, there was a profound calm, as if we were saying goodbye to each other on opposite sides of the road.
Then, the blade moved suddenly—a burst of pain, and I squatted on the ground, holding the wound. The blood flowed out from between my fingers and stained my clothes red.
He pulled out the knife but didn't stab him.
Xu Tuo dropped his knife, leaned against the tree trunk, and cursed for a long time. Then he squatted in front of me, reached out to stop the bleeding, and continued to curse.
"I can't do anything with you." He gritted his teeth, "There's really nothing I can do. Let's go, I'll take you away, and we'll never come back."
He hugged me very tightly.
We both knew that we only had each other.
Over the next few days, we officially hit the road. He predicted several blockades, prepared the necessary equipment for the hike, and taught me how to change my face with braces.
We wrapped things around our bodies to change our body shape. Upper and lower braces could change the size of our cheeks and the shape of our lips. Plastic objects stuffed directly into our mouths could change our cheekbones. We used glue to create wrinkles, eye bags or eye sockets... As we hurried on our way, we tried out all kinds of disguises, and I kept smiling at the mirror in the car.
He replaced Ajie's car with a red one, the kind of French sedan I had wanted to buy for a long time. It had retro lines, unique headlights, and a travel rack on the roof that could hold luggage, surfboards, and bicycles.
"Which city in the north do you want to go to?" he asked.
I said Qingdao.
Xu Tuo also liked Qingdao. The weather was great, the food was delicious, and during the beer festival, the streets were lined with barbecue stalls, men and women sipped beer, and the music was deafening. There were also so many luxury cars on the road that no one would pay attention to the two square-faced men with buck teeth.
There are many routes, and after Christmas, the New Year's travel atmosphere takes over, with tourists coming and going, and we blend in with the crowds. Peak season offers the perfect escape. We're stuck on the highway with thousands of other cars, listening to the drivers yelling and chatting. We sit on the roofs of our cars, watching the gridlocked highway ahead. Many others, like us, sit on the roofs to get some fresh air.
We can't see how far the road ahead is.