“Buses? Why on earth do we suddenly need to check buses?”
The next day, Ji Mingrui sat in his office pressing his temples, asking the question.
Having drunk way too much alcohol the night previous, his entire head was dizzy when he woke up this morning. The moment he stepped through the front gates of the police station, he saw all his colleagues busy working in a heated bustle. Su Xiaolan tossed a USB flash drive in front of him without saying a word: “You’re in charge of this section of the surveillance footage. Focus on checking the passengers inside the buses that passed by this particular bus station stop. See if a person wearing a hat, acting secretive, and behaving suspiciously appears inside the vehicle.”
Ji Mingrui muttered under his breath, “What happened? Why do we suddenly need to check the station surveillance for no good reason?”
Su Xiaolan recalled the words of Brother Bin when the headquarters issued the assignment this morning: “Apparently they said there’s a bank robber… who might be fleeing within the city by riding a bus.”
A bank robber?
They hadn’t received any report of such a crime.
Carrying a few doubts, Ji Mingrui clicked open the USB drive.
There were several hundred segments of video inside the flash drive, which was no small workload. He began carefully reviewing them clip by clip to perform the first round of screening.
However, when Ji Mingrui was halfway through, he clicked open the next segment of surveillance footage. Within the black-and-white color scheme of the surveillance screen, he spotted a familiar bus—Bus 714.
Bus 714 quickly continued driving forward, the characters “714” on the front of the bus flashing past.
He urgently paused the frame. He remembered that last night, while he was standing at the entrance of the funeral hall smoking a cigarette, he had seen this very bus.
By this point, Ji Mingrui had already checked countless buses in the surveillance footage. These buses had a high rate of repetition, only differing in their scheduled shifts. Each bus began operating from the morning, running numerous trips over the course of a single day.
Su Xiaolan tilted her head back and squeezed a few drops of eye drops into her eyes, preparing to take a short break. After applying the eye drops, she saw Ji Mingrui sitting blankly in front of the computer without moving an inch. She asked, “What’s wrong? Stared yourself stupid?”
Ji Mingrui had just noted down the numbers of these buses. After minimizing the surveillance page, he clicked open the South China City traffic planning map. He stared at those several bus route maps lined up together, quickly discovering a commonality among all the bus routes, including Bus 714.
The commonality was—they all passed by the funeral hall.
Late at night.
Two men, whose current identities could not be exposed to the light, wore masks and pulled up their hoods as they went out to a nearby convenience store to buy some things.
This kind of small shop didn’t have surveillance cameras. It was already late into the night, and the convenience store clerk was so drowsy that he only wanted to sleep. Therefore, even though the two of them were completely bundled up, they didn’t attract the cashier’s attention when they first walked in.
“…” The female cashier yawned and said, “Welcome.”
It wasn’t convenient for Xie Lin to speak. He walked over to the snack shelves, tapped his finger on the candies on the shelf, and silently inquired: Want some?
Chi Qing was only wearing one glove; his other hand was bare and kept gripping Xie Lin’s hand tightly, refusing to let go.
Xie Lin: “Why have you been so clingy these past few days?”
Chi Qing’s voice sounded muffled through his mask: “Because it wasn’t easy to finally see you.”
Ever since the two of them met again, Chi Qing had been exceptionally clingy toward him.
Sometimes when he got up in the middle of the night, Chi Qing would dazedly grab his hand and ask, “Where are you going?”
Xie Lin would patiently coax him, “I’ll be right back.”
Chi Qing: “I’m going with you.”
Xie Lin: “I’m going to the restroom and you want to go too?”
Chi Qing let out a grunt of assent from his nose.
“You’ll be able to see me every day from now on.” Xie Lin took the bag of candy down from the shelf. Thinking back to when the two of them had first met, he found it somewhat amusing. “I wonder who it was at the very beginning who couldn’t even stand being touched.”
Chi Qing: “Back then I wasn’t familiar with you.”
In the end, the two of them carried the items back to their residence. When Xie Lin was putting the things away, he noticed that Chi Qing’s hand still hadn’t loosened.
“I’m going to take a shower.”
Xie Lin gave their clasped hands a gentle shake. “Or do you want to come in and shower together with me?”
Only then did Chi Qing let go of his hand. “Then shower faster.”
After Xie Lin closed the bathroom door, just as he was about to take off his clothes, he suddenly felt that something wasn’t right.
He suddenly thought: That day when Chi Qing came back after watching the funeral, what was the first thing he said upon entering the door?
He thought about it for a moment, recalling the cigarette he smoked upon waking up that day, and also recalling the sentence Chi Qing said while standing at the doorway:
—“Why didn’t you keep sleeping? Were you woken up by the noise?”
This sentence was like a silent bolt of lightning, suddenly cracking right next to his ear.
That day, the residential building was very quiet; absolutely no noise could be heard. There was a kid who went to school living on the first floor, but that day he seemed to be quietly doing his homework. A man lived on the second floor, but that man usually acted like a ghost, locking himself in his room, and no one knew what he was up to.
There wasn’t any sound disturbing him.
So why would Chi Qing say that sentence?
Why did he feel that it was… noisy?
The image of that glass of alcohol in the bar that night—which had burst into flames after he smashed it to the ground—flashed before Xie Lin’s eyes. He couldn’t help but wonder: Before that glass hit the ground, was the amount of alcohol inside the glass still the original portion that had been served?
Thinking up to this point, Xie Lin pulled open the bathroom door.
Chi Qing, who was curled up halfway on the living room sofa, was covering his ears with one hand—a very obvious posture of someone finding it too noisy.
He hadn’t brought many clothes with him on this trip; the garment he was currently wearing was the white sweater Xie Lin had just washed clean. The white color worn on his body made his entire person look like he possessed a fragile, translucent quality. Chi Qing kept his eyes cast down. Even though he was already trying his absolute best to endure it, he still looked thoroughly overwhelmed by the noise.
By the time Chi Qing heard the movement and wanted to put his hand down, it was already too late. Seeing Xie Lin’s expression, he froze for a moment like a child who had rarely done something wrong, and then revealed a few hints of bewilderment and helplessness.
After a long pause, he even said somewhat cautiously, “I… have a headache.”
Xie Lin was almost driven to a furious laugh.
“A headache?”
“I fell into the water that day,” Chi Qing said. “My constitution isn’t good.”
Xie Lin suppressed the urge to drag this person over and give him a beating. He walked over, placed his palm over Chi Qing’s ear, and asked softly, “How much did you drink?”
Chi Qing pursed his lips. “One sip.”
Xie Lin saw right through it. “Tell the truth.”
Chi Qing: “Quite a lot.”
Xie Lin did not continue pressing him on why he drank it. The answer was glaringly obvious: that day, “that person” would definitely be nearby, so maybe he could hear something; perhaps he would appear within the range of what Chi Qing could hear.
Xie Lin didn’t ask why he drank it, but he did ask one question: “Aren’t you afraid of the noise?”
He knew better than anyone else how much Chi Qing detested those voices.
Those voices would pour in from all directions, wrapping around him as suffocatingly as the river water that night, and they wouldn’t stop for a single instant.
Chi Qing said, “I am afraid, but I am even more afraid that it will take too long for you to come back. You should be walking among the crowd, walking under the sunshine, instead of hiding out like you are now.”
Xie Lin was stunned.
Xie Lin shouldn’t be living this kind of life.
So that night, before he and Xie Lin feigned an altercation, he had surreptitiously drunk nearly half a glass of that alcohol.
He didn’t know what the consequences of drinking so much alcohol would be, or for how many days those voices would endlessly ring in his ears, but he drank it anyway.
…
Immediately following that, the bar had been packed with people, bubbling with the clamor of voices.
Countless distorted voices exploded right next to his ears.
Xie Lin felt his throat go a bit dry. With an effort, he spoke of another matter that he originally hadn’t paid attention to: “So your going to the funeral scene wasn’t because you wanted to watch your own funeral either. You were guessing whether that person would also be there, and you wanted to confirm his voice, right?”
Right after, Xie Lin slowly squatted down in front of the sofa, meeting the eyes of Chi Qing who was curled up on it. He extended his other hand as well, covering both of Chi Qing’s ears with his hands, and asked, “What did you hear that day?”
“A lot of voices,” Chi Qing recalled. “There were simply too many people in the bar.”
“I couldn’t be sure, but there was one very suspicious voice. That same voice appeared on the day of the funeral as well.”
“What did ‘he’ say?”
“…”
Chi Qing slowly closed his eyes.
His memory was pulled back to that day.
Amidst countless different voices, he had caught an exceptionally hoarse, bizarre voice. That voice was able to be captured by him because everyone around was speaking, while he was laughing.
[Ha…]
Perhaps it was the sharp intuition shared among anomalies at play, but when Chi Qing heard this laughter, his entire body froze up as if he had been bitten by a venomous snake hiding in the dark.
Then he heard the next sentence.
[…and… are… the same.]
[We are all the same.]
The voices were jumbled together; there were too many, and it was too chaotic.
The information Chi Qing finally heard wasn’t precise.
He still didn’t know what “that person” actually wanted to express.
Nor did he know how to find him based on those two sentences.
That day, Chi Qing had held a black umbrella, standing outside the funeral hall. The umbrella handle was tilted, covering his face. He heard many, many voices floating out from inside the funeral hall, from the streets, and from the passing vehicles.
[Who is this? Dying at such a young age.]
[The last time I saw Assistant Chi he was perfectly fine. Who could have thought a life would be gone just like that.]
[…Sigh, my condolences.]
[…]
Intermingled within these was a voice just as hoarse as the one from the bar that day.
That voice said indifferently: 【How boring.】
【Dying just like that. I thought I could play with you for a bit longer.】
But this voice appeared very briefly, as if just passing by.
Only later did Chi Qing figure out why—because at that time, he was inside a passing bus.
Chi Qing felt a bit discouraged. “Aside from these, I didn’t hear anything else.”
Hearing up to this point, the hands Xie Lin used to cover Chi Qing’s ears suddenly tightened slightly, and the man’s pupils abruptly turned even darker: “No, you did hear it.”
“I heard it?”
What did he hear?
“It’s the time,” Xie Lin said.
“The time his voice appeared.”
Xie Lin continued, “This can pinpoint which bus and which specific shift he was in at that moment. Do you still remember roughly what time you heard the voice?”
Chi Qing abruptly lifted his eyes.
Chi Qing had been tormented by a headache from these voices next to his ears during this period, slowing down his speed of thought. Furthermore, humans always have blind spots in their thinking. Because he could hear them, what he cared about more was the content of what he heard.
He was always thinking about what he could hear.
What “that person” was thinking in his mind, who he actually was, and where he was.
…
But he had forgotten the time.
The time that voice appeared.
“It doesn’t have to be extremely precise, a rough interval works too,” Xie Lin said. “Recall carefully, when you were standing on the road and heard him, did anything else special happen?”
Chi Qing forcefully dragged his mind back to that day. That day, continuous drizzle fell, raindrops smacking against the black umbrella, and the honking of passing cars never ceased.
