Chapter Thirty-Six: The Shadow of the Rear Window

When I look back on it sometimes, two words come to mind: patient. www.biquge.info In this era, it seems that everything is abnormal, unhealthy, and extremely sick, but after so many years in B City, I am accustomed to all pathologies, and maybe I have become an incurable patient.

It's like that midsummer night, at a bar in Houhai, a guy took his beautiful model girlfriend to drink with me, and then he asked me to go to the toilet with him. Halfway through the pee, he suddenly pushed me into the toilet cubicle. I fucking slapped him in the face, and he said don't get me wrong, I'm as straight as you, you just wait here, just wait a minute.

With that, he closed the door of the toilet cubicle, and before I could react, he had already pushed his beautiful girlfriend in. She coldly pushed me down on the toilet, and I sat there in fear, like a child who had just popped out of a slimy ** looking at the sick world, and the buddy was eavesdropping with relish in the next compartment.

He later told me that I gave him more pleasure that night than he had with his girlfriend combined.

Then, helplessly, I fell, and I was terminally ill.

I didn't know what the trajectory of my life was, and I suddenly left City B, which I had been haunted by, and returned to the place where I was born. I never thought I'd complete that heart-wrenching metamorphosis in City B.

The things in my hometown are gradually leading me to recover from my illness.

Coming out of Widow Ye's house, the strange and familiar scene around me made me so confused for the first time. There are many small buildings of different heights and different images, and from a distance, it looks like people in different clothes are huddled together to keep warm.

In the past, some people wanted to unify the houses in the whole town into one appearance, saying that in order to attract investment and business, they would standardize management. Not a single resident of the town agreed, and the man was almost drowned in the saliva of the crowd.

The town has an inexplicable nostalgic tradition, even a lot of rebellion.

Although they are thousands of miles apart and have very different cultures, the persistence of small places is so vivid and stubborn. After the death of Queen Elizabeth, the British ordered the Irish to paint the doors of their homes black, but the people there painted the doors in various colors such as red, blue, white, green and yellow. It is said that there are the smartest wives in the world, who paint their doors in different colors to prevent their men from going to the wrong door and sleeping in someone else's bed after getting drunk at night.

When I came to the street, a few melancholy-looking village women hurried past with baskets on their backs, and the sound of mahjong rubbing came from the teahouse, which would not stop until the end of the world, 24 hours a day. Lu Zehuan and his grandfather Uncle Lu are frequent customers, this old man is a thief, and he can't deceive him, and he can find out the problem at a glance.

In a trance, his body seemed to be lodged on an unknown planet, and he knew nothing about everything around him.

The town was always wet in my memory, filled with the scent of greenery, and children frolicking in the streets. As soon as it arrived, the crowd was boiling, and all kinds of fortune tellers selling vegetables, fruits, dog skins, plasters, and fortune tellers gathered together, full of rustic shouts. Nowadays, the prosperity is gone, and the town is a lot cleaner.

Pacing up to the red toad stone, petting it, fantasizing that it could turn into an all-knowing beast and tell me all the secrets, goodness, and sins of this town. But I know that there are stones and then legends, not the other way around, it's just a broken red sandstone.

The puddle of water must have led to some underground river, where there were no Saints, Smurfs, and Doraemon, only icy water and creatures with degraded eyes fooling around in the dark.

There are always a few points in the culture of various peoples that can be connected to each other, and the poet Eliot's "Love Song" uses the "puddle" as a metaphor for female genitalia, and our leaders also perceive the connection between the two.

In previous years, there were often leaders with impotence driving Audis to this pit to ask for holy water, and I think our children's urine may really cure their impotence.

I took a black car to Yuanwei Middle School, and the black car master was full of alcohol, with a red pig kidney, and laughed hehehe, saying that it was not in the way after a small drink.

If I would never have gotten into this car before, I had a sense of open-mindedness about life and death after experiencing some things, and I wanted to die hiding in the house and being crushed to death by an airplane engine, fuck it.

The black car master said, young man, you must be a soldier if you have a solid figure.

I said no.

But he apparently knew what I was doing better than I did, insisting that I was a soldier.

I simply compromised and said that I was a soldier.

He asked me how many years I had been in the army.

I've been making it up for three years.

He said that I had also been a soldier, and I had never seen such a handsome little soldier as you.

I said okay.

He asked me again if I had graduated from Yuanwei High School.

I said yes.

He said ouch, you still want to be a soldier after graduating from high school, lie to me, boy, you definitely don't be a soldier.

At this point, I want to jump out of the window cleanly.

Coming to Yuanwei Middle School, this situation and this scene make people feel sad that "the face of the person does not know where to go, and the peach blossoms are still smiling in the spring breeze".

Clusters of white school buildings and green lawns complement each other, and Yuanwei Middle School looks like steamed buns fermented in a steamer that have swelled three times compared to the original.

High school life is vivid, but the row of honest poplar trees that can provide shade in the school playground has been cut down due to the expansion of the playground.

At that time, as soon as summer came, the huge flower caterpillars suddenly fell from the trees and fell into people's necks accurately, and the boys grabbed these insects to scare the girls, causing the classroom to be full of chickens and dogs.

Then, the head teacher named Liang Yunsnake appeared on the podium with a high spirit, and he said Isn't it just a caterpillar, as for setting off such a big movement.

Once, during recess exercises, Liang Yunsnake stood in the shade of a tree to supervise us, and a huge caterpillar fell onto his shoulder.

A big man was scared and screamed by a caterpillar in front of the whole school, and we couldn't say anything, so we could only pretend that we weren't his students.

This school is responsible for persecuting students and creating top students in the college entrance examination, and it is more famous than this county seat. A lot of students from other places come here, and to be precise, parents should be admiring their children to detain here. Because of the awesomeness of Yuanwei Middle School, the leaders of the county town are making a fuss every day about education to catch up with Haidian in City B and Huanggang in Province H, and catch up with Britain and the United States in ten years.

It was here that Geng Hao, Fu Wenxin, Mei Ge, and Lu Zehuan and I gathered and scattered every day with our schoolbags on our backs, talking, laughing, and laughing. Looking back suddenly, the ordinary and hard life at that time is as heavy as a thousand gold in the treasure house of memory.

Walk in the parks, snack streets, and amusement parks of the county, and reminisce about the scenes when you were there. When I came to the Swallow Tower, I thought of the warm night I spent there with Fu Wenxin after the college entrance examination, and my heart was sour, and I felt a little faint pain after the sourness. The tower was piled up with all kinds of cigarette boxes, plastic bags, condoms and people-pulled Xiang, the smell was stinking, and I didn't want to stay longer, so I went down the tower immediately.

The other name of this county town is Pocheng, and there are two explanations for why it is called Pocheng. Some people say that the silhouette of Po Cheng is in the shape of an old woman when viewed from an airplane, which can be found on the map of Po Cheng city. Now there is a lot of construction, and ghost buildings are being built everywhere in the new area where no one lives, and the pattern of the city has long been destroyed beyond recognition.

There is also a saying that the name of this city comes from an old woman. A long time ago, there was a yellow cypress tree with lush branches by the Qingxi River in Pocheng, this tree is the totem of Pocheng, and every year there are people burning incense under the tree and tying red cloth on the tree to seek peace.

During the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, there were dragons hunting in the Qingxi River, and the river flooded in midsummer to flood the rice fields and people and animals. One day, a one-eyed Taoist did three days and three nights by the river, and finally put the dragon hunting town at the bottom of the river. After the Taoist was finished, he disappeared under the yellow cypress tree, and some people said that the Taoist was transformed by the yellow cypress tree.

Later, an old woman set up a thatched hut under the yellow cypress tree to sell bean curd, which was fragrant for ten miles and became a local food and drink. Everyone saw that the mother-in-law's shop made money, and they all went to the river to build a grass shed and started a cottage business that the Chinese are familiar with, and there were more and more bean flower shops, and finally it became a bean flower street.

The mother-in-law was afraid that the number of customers would decrease, so she scrubbed the dishes, chopsticks, tables and stools clean, and the guests always greeted them with a smile when they came, so there was an endless stream of customers who came to the store to eat bean curd.

One day, a feng shui gentleman with a beard carrying a gossip flag walked into the city of Pocheng, the people of the city hurriedly surrounded it, Mr. Feng Shui took out the compass, and the mouth always recited the words: "There is a mystery here, it is above the kun hexagram, and it has yin qi, and the place where yin flourishes and yang declines!" ”

The men in Pocheng understood the meaning of Mr. Feng Shui, and from then on, the people who opened restaurants in the city pretended to be their mothers-in-law, and for a while, the "mother-in-law shops" were flooded, and Pocheng came from this.

When I was younger, F4 used to ride an hour's bicycle from Qiaobian Town to Pocheng, which was really a ruined city at that time, but fortunately the water and air were not polluted. The clear stream flows quietly at our feet, fish and shrimp frolic in the meantime, and the river is full of old fishers.

Less than a fifth of Jiazi, the Qingxi River has become a stinky ditch, disgusting green foam floats in the river, and the fish, shrimp and crabs between the rocks have long since moved to where they have moved. The people of Pocheng have a thrilling nightmare, and when they wake up, the inky river has already soaked into their homeland.

The river is like the rotting intestines of the county town, and no one wants to stop next to her or even take a second look at the waste paper, plastic bags and sanitary napkins that are free on its surface.

There's a heart-rending song that says, "We can't go back," and yes, we can't fucking go back. The demise of childhood, the decline of the countryside, and the degradation of the environment have left the soul without a place to be ashamed. I remember that I just went to Lie B City, why did it all become like this after I came back?

I am annoyed with people, frustrated with society, depressed and helpless. After strolling around the county for an afternoon, I was about to take another black car back to the town, and I met the drunk black car driver again. At that time, he was much more sober, and asked me, young man, what the hell are you doing.

I said, I'm writing.

He admired it and said that writers are great, you write about the pollution of our small place, you look at what has become of the environment around us, they are all doing things that are unique to grandchildren.

I said, okay, I'll write.

After he sent me to town, he didn't want my money, saying that he respected intellectuals, and that if I didn't agree, I would look down on him.

Seeing how sincere and stubborn he was, I took the money.

I didn't go home directly, I went directly to the police station to find Uncle Zhou, and bumped into him at the door.

He told me disappointedly, "Xiaoyu, I was about to look for you. Liu Xue and Huang Qiang's two turtle sons were caught. After the interrogation, they had nothing to do with the disappearance of Wenwu's daughter. On the night of these two dog days, I bought a red panda from a poacher in the town, and poured it to another vendor, saying that there was an official who wanted to buy a red panda, and what to cure rheumatism and impotence, these turtle grandchildren. ”

"Then all the clues are broken."

"yes, now we have to start working on it again, I thought about it, maybe you're right, the people who do bad things are from our town." Zhou Bo was thoughtful.

When I got home, my heart was in turmoil, and I came to the window, and the twilight was heavy, looking at the locust trees, I felt deeply lonely. People and trees are both.

Lu Xun wrote at the beginning of "Autumn Night": "In my back garden, I can see two trees outside the wall, one is a jujube tree, and the other is also a jujube tree. "At the time, I didn't know what was going on, and I thought the old man was nervous and playing with words. The teacher didn't understand it, saying that Lu Xun had a tricky mind, and he could write as much as he wanted.

Later, after I learned about the loneliness and despair in Lu Xun's heart, I found that he wrote this way to keep the two jujube trees lonely and helpless. One date tree is lonely, and so is the other.

The locust tree stood there silently, as if it had seen through the vicissitudes of red dust. The grass and trees are ruthless, and life is lonely, how can they understand. At this moment, I flickered to the farthest tree, and there was a dark figure behind it, and it was evident that someone was standing there, as if staring at me.

I shouted "who". The shadow stood still.

Who's going to be behind my house at this late hour? Is it really like what Zhou Bo said, this locust tree is heavy and dirty. But I didn't believe that, so I hurried downstairs, took a rolling pin for myself, and rushed behind the tree, but found nothing.

Maybe it's because I've been thinking too much and I'm dazzled these days.

I went back to the house, opened my laptop, and began to look through photos from my college days, and fell into memories that I couldn't extricate myself.

There is a photo that Yuan and I are in the dormitory, and Yang Chenjun took it for the two of us. He held a guitar and spat out his pig-like tongue, and couldn't help but smile when he looked at it.