Author: Tongo
Repost: yellow bugs
（１）
At midnight, the noisy sounds of people woke up Lin Zheng who was on duty.
A few wet by the rain wage earners to send a patient huddled in the diagnostic bed – I do not know whether it is the rain or the intense abdominal pain forced out of the sweat, the patient’s thick black hair, a complex of pasted on the head, he has fallen into a coma, the face of the paper, the lips are blue, the body a burst of involuntary spasms. His abdominal pain has been more than two days, colleagues did not care at first, just after the mid-shift back to the dormitory, called him and he just moaned and did not answer, only to realize the seriousness of the disease, had to take the rain to send him. They were a group of poor wage earners who had left their hometowns to make their own way in the world.
Lin Zheng rushed to examine him. When he finally found the sore spot – his finger touched the feverish and disturbingly pulsating swelling in the groin, he sucked in a breath of cold air – this was small intestinal intussusception caused by a hernia, with the descending intestinal tubes stuck at the pubic bone, and the patient was already in a coma with a high fever, and it wasn’t hard to tell that The patient was already in a coma with high fever and it wasn’t hard to tell that the condition had reached the stage of intestinal necrosis and systemic poisoning, which could lead to an even more horrific peritoneal perforation at any time…
Lin Zheng was in a difficult situation. The hospital he was working in was just a small local hospital with a health care center, and although it had an operating room, it usually only performed minor surgical procedures, and never did anything more than suturing general wounds and removing swelling and pus. Patients like this were always transferred to other major hospitals, but… At this moment, he was painfully reluctant to do so. He knew that it would take at least an hour or more to get to the nearest hospital, and on such a rainy night, with such a group of young wage earners, if there was any trouble with the deposit and the procedures, who knows if the patients would have any accidents?
Lin Zheng resolutely decided that he would operate on the boy here – he sent the doctor on duty to quickly call the two interns who were sleeping in the dormitory. They knew that Lin Zheng had been a senior student at a prestigious medical school, and had also been the attending surgeon at one of the city’s most prestigious hospitals, and had seen the world, and had “hard cash” in his hands. The two interns are the children of farmers, just no backing, only to be assigned to the internship here. They are always looking forward to the highly respected Lin boss doctor can teach them a little tough skills, tonight is a good opportunity to meet unexpectedly. Lin Zheng nervously prepared himself before the surgery.
There was no shadowless light, no inhalation anesthesia equipment, not even an operating table with a lift function… Before the patient was sent to the operating table, Lin Zheng did another meticulous check, hooked up the patient’s infusion bottles, and prepared all the emergency medicines in case of any possible changes…
There was a sense of transcendent sanctity as he stepped up to the operating table. He was confident in his skills. He recalled that nearly thirty years ago when the Xingtai earthquake, also at the age of this patient, he participated in the medical team to the disaster area, there is no whatsoever of the surgical facilities, in the temporary canvas tent, he successfully carried out dozens of patients surgical resuscitation, including open trauma in the abdomen, the bloody intestines squeezed to the outside of the body. It was on that occasion that he met and shook hands with Premier Zhou Enlai, who came to inspect the disaster, and when he returned to the hospital, he was awarded prizes and honorary flowers, and the photo of him wearing a big red flower on his chest was enlarged to two feet and hung in the big window at the entrance of the hospital, ┅┅But all of this was later obliterated by the horrible accusation, and he was dispatched to this sanitarium, which was still a suburb at that time. His personnel file still has the yellowed paper but still blackened ink – “Lasciviousness, moral turpitude, bad behavior, hooliganism,…”
His hand trembled as he picked up the scalpel. He closed his eyes tightly to calm himself for a long time before focusing his thoughts on the part of the human body that was exposed under the white perforated scarf that covered the operating table, and… It was not until the morning light dawned in the east that the patient was taken out of the operating room.
Two interns carried a white porcelain tray containing about three inches of intestines cut from the patient’s body and showed it to the wage earners who had escorted the patient to the hospital. The intestines were a horrible dark green color, with yellowish-white pus spots already appearing on them… “If it weren’t for Dr. Lin, hmmm, it would have been time to send him to the crematorium, so that he would have remembered Dr. Lin’s kindness in saving his life!”
At this moment, Lin Zheng was in the hospital room. He stroked the patient’s forehead, and the touch of his fingers triggered another impulse in his heart that was hard to resist.
He already knew that the patient’s name was Qin Yang, twenty-four years old.
Qin Yang was still in a post-operative stupor, and Lin Zheng examined him, realizing that Qin Yang not only had a graceful nose that made his heart pound as if it had been skillfully shaped by a master craftsman, but also had a handsome face and a robust body.
He stroked Qin Yang, savoring the kind of pleasure the fit homosexual being of that age had once brought to himself.
There was a noise that startled the forest administration.
It was the two interns and the group of wage earners who were quietly gathering around him for fear of making a noise… His heart was pounding rapidly, and his body was shaking with a nervousness that could not easily be detected by others… He was busy giving the medical advice on post-operative care, and, despite the gratitude of the wage earners, he left in a hurry on the pretext that he was a bit tired.
He panicked almost as if fleeing a disaster and almost fell down the steps. He ran all the way back to his eight-square-meter “nest” in the small backyard of the hospital, next to the boiler room, and only then did he feel stable.
It was late fall. The morning after the rain, his small room in some damp breath, most of the door and window glass with old newspaper glued, the house only a narrow single bed, a peeled off the lacquer skin of the simple desk, a triangle welded very crude tall shelves right filled with closet, pantry, bookcase, miscellaneous closet, in addition to this, the whole room is filled with only the loneliness of the chilly.
Sitting down, he actually somewhat regretted admitting this unknown Qin Yang. At the very least, this Qin Yang needed to be personally cared for and treated by him after the surgery for a week. He was really afraid that he would lose control for a moment and cause that disastrous trouble again.
Just now, when the nurse lifted the white sheet from Qin Yang’s body to reveal his strong, toned, white-skinned nude body, he felt like a bomb had been detonated in front of his eyes, and was overwhelmed by a wave of energy that he could hardly contain himself…
He is fifty-six years old. He has already exceeded what Confucius said, “the year of destiny”. He felt that his pursuit of homosexual beauty and adoration had been eroded by the years to the extent that they were like tiny grains of sand on the desert. His heart was dead, his love was extinguished, and he was already an emotionless mummy… But this Qin Yang was like a spark that ignited the dry wood of his lust, and his chest felt hot… (2)
His teenage friend, Tianjie, had such a straight and proud nose.
He had kissed the bridge of that nose countless times, secretly kissing and burning with the sincere love of two same-sex teenagers who adored each other.
Later, not only was Tien Chieh the son of a junior Kuomintang quartermaster who had fled to Taiwan, but he was also taken away in handcuffs as a “rogue criminal” for revealing his love affair with another teenager of the same sex, and was banished to the distant Tengger Desert, where he remained for years without any trace of his life or death, and… but Lin Zheng couldn’t give up his pursuit. He broke up with his wife, was disciplined, and was sent to a health center where there were only three village doctors, a young and talented leader of a first-class hospital, but under the supervision and leadership of three men with black dirt under their fingernails, who couldn’t write all the words they knew on a piece of paper less than the size of the palm of their hand, and who dared to stick needles in patients’ mouths with a single pursing of their needles, and who to this day remain an ordinary doctor with no title and no position. title, no position of the ordinary doctor. He seemed to be chasing after it all the time, aiming at Tianjie’s shadow and chasing after the immortal sinful love. …
Tianjie was his classmate in high school. Lin Zheng could no longer remember how the two were particularly close. He only remembered that Tianjie was handsome and cheerful. Tianjie could do a marvelous sailor’s dance, recite Gorky’s Haiyan with passion, and write beautiful art characters without using a primer. At that time, both Tianjie and Linzheng wanted to join the Communist Youth League, but Tianjie, with his father who had run away to Taiwan, and Linzheng, with his grandfather who had worked in a foreign bank, had to undergo a more special test than the others. So the two of them always try to help others with their good deeds, thinking that they are good enough to be tested. However, during one of the discussions to solicit their opinions on joining the troupe, their classmates pointed out that they were too “proud”, that they liked to be in the limelight, that they did good deeds for their own sake, and that they were not qualified… On that occasion, they went to the river outside the school walls and went down to the river together, and released their grievances by fighting against the turbulent waters of the river in the summer flood season! The school was in the middle of the summer flood season. They were tired, went to the bank, hidden in the dense bushes under the boulders of the steep cliffs on the bank. As the sun shone hotly that day, the two 18-year-old bodies revealed their angry, confused bodies, and they shared their grievances and tears… From that moment on, they felt an indescribable attraction for each other. In silence, the clasping of their hands sent a strange electric thrill that they themselves could not explain. Finally, on a sultry summer evening, with Lin Zheng in front and Tianjie behind him, and one of Tianjie’s hands on Lin Zheng’s shoulder, the two of them talked about the injustices that had been done to them around the world, while the other two of their hands slipped into each other’s shorts… The frogs stopped their drumming, the river stopped its flow, the clouds in the sky ceased to flow, the wind stopped, and, feeling that what they were talking about was boring, they used their lips and tongues to create an atmosphere of excitement in the hearts of the two young men. They used their lips and tongues to create the rare pleasure that the two young men were so eagerly seeking…
Lin Zheng also remembered that since that time, it had become almost impossible for the two of them to let go of this kind of pleasure. He remembered that the first time T’ien Chieh had asked him to “take him”, he had heard about what “taking him” was all about, and the idea that it was a shame had vanished into thin air. He felt a sharp pain that shivered through his whole body, but he accepted it. In the midst of the pain, he felt another kind of satisfaction, that Tianjie’s beauty belonged to him, that Tianjie’s vividness belonged to him, and… When he took Tianjie in the same way, his satisfaction was at its peak, and he wished that the myth would be fulfilled in his case – the hunter Hai Buli had broken the rules of the sky and told the people that the sea was about to flood the land, and the people escaped, but Hai Buli was punished by the heavens as a fossil The townspeople escaped, while Hai Buli was punished by the heavens as a fossil and drowned forever at the bottom of the sea. He felt that if he and T’ien Chieh, who had also violated the laws of heaven, were punished as fossils, and were thus joined together, kissed, and submerged at the bottom of the sea, bathed by the pure waters of the sea, accompanied by free fishes, free from other people’s blows and disparaging remarks, free from jealousy, free from interference, and able to enjoy each other’s youthfulness and handsome body forever, it would be so wonderful,…
But life came at them with nothing but a wave of evil that wanted to separate them and break them apart.
Despite his versatility and academic excellence, Tianjie could not go to university because of his father’s “political problems” and was assigned to work as a waiter in a public bath.
Lin Zheng goes to medical school and the two part ways reluctantly.
Skyjay gave him a farewell party at Skyjay’s house.
After saying a few words of praise and envy for Lin Zheng, Tianjie’s mother just silently made way for Lin Zheng. She didn’t dare to say a single word in defense of her beloved son; she was the wife of a “historical counter-revolutionary,” and she was being watched by countless eyes and ears, even though she had married Tianjie’s father in order to get a few bucks to pay for the treatment of his father, who was pulling a yellow cart, and even though Tianjie’s father had been coerced by the army to leave his home to put on the uniform he didn’t want to wear, and even though he only wanted to save a few bucks to pay for the treatment. Wearing that body he did not want to wear the uniform, but also despite the fact that he only wanted to save up a few money to find a chance to return home to Henan, a few acres of land, to do a peaceful and self-respecting farmers, but was a paper “transfer order” sent on the landing craft, sent to the island of Taiwan he did not expect to abandon his wife and children, otherwise, he would not leave his wife and children regardless of.
Suffocatingly dull.
Lin Zheng just and Tianjie silently drink to each other. There was no need to say anything more about the past or the present, and what they had to say could only be conveyed by looking into each other’s eyes, with Tien Chieh’s mother in attendance. Both of them were holding back tears, their hearts burning with bitterness from the wine and their hearts burning with love… That night Tien Chieh walked him out for a long time until the two of them entered a dilapidated brick hut in a secluded alleyway, where they embraced and licked the warm, salty tears from their faces. The warm, salty tears on their faces…
（３）
On his first vacation, Lin Zheng hadn’t even sat down when he got home and went looking for Tianjie.
It was the beginning of the 1960s, when China was plunged into a national famine after the frenzied “Great Leap Forward”.
Because of the constant hunger and the lack of other food supplements, eight out of ten Chinese at that time suffered from malnutritional edema.
Lin Zheng is no exception.
After walking a long way to the bathhouse where Tien Chieh was staying, Lim Jung was out of breath, and the steaming heat was so intense that his heart was pounding…
When he heard someone looking for him, Tien Chieh, who was completely naked with only a stained old towel around his waist, came out at the sound of the voice, and when he saw that it was Lin Zheng, he stared at him in a daze. Lin Zheng tried to run over to shake his hand, but he was so dizzy that he stumbled, and… Tien Jie rushed to help him up, “What’s wrong with you?”
“No… nothing, I’m dizzy,…”
“I’ll help you lie down for a while.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,…”
Although Lin Zheng responded in this way, his body was so limp that he couldn’t listen to orders.
T’ien Chieh helped him onto a narrow wooden bed where bathers lay, turned and ran away, and a moment later brought back a cup of water, very sweet, with white sugar, which was considered a luxury by ordinary people at that time, and… Someone shouted for T’ien Chieh, and he shoved the cup at Lin Ch’ien, telling him, “Hold it steady, and drink it slowly, don’t be in a hurry.” He turned away again.
Lin Zheng sipped the sweet and somewhat sticky water, but his heart was bitter, he hated himself for not being competitive, had envisioned all sorts of romances of meeting with Tianjie, wanted to give him a surprise, wanted to pour out his misses for him, wanted to ask him about the situation of being separated for this nearly a year, but was all shattered by the dizziness caused by this bout of hunger of his own.
Rations strictly limited distribution, such as he is growing body of the big boys, only twenty-eight pounds of rations per month, only half a catty of pork two two oil, nothing else, not to mention their own empty pockets, that is, the money, but also still can not buy anything to a common doctor’s entire monthly salary, only in the “high-priced stores” to buy back less than With the entire monthly salary of an ordinary doctor, he could only buy less than a hundred candies at the “high-priced store”. Lin Zheng left school, the month’s rations have long been eaten up, all the way home, he only ate a few persimmons to fill his hunger, after arriving at home, only said that he had eaten, and then rushed to see Tianjie. He didn’t want to, but he was in a hurry and the hot air from the bath made him lose his grip and…
Skyjay turned up again and asked him, “How’s it going?”
Asking, he reached out and pressed a finger to his calf, then stroked the deep dimple that had been pressed and sighed, “Can’t get enough to eat at school, can you?”
Lin Zheng could see that Tianjie had been fumigated by the steam from the bath all day, and was whiter than ever, almost bloodless and miserable. Tianjie was also thin, his flattened chest flaring angrily with a line of ribs.
“Come tonight, I’m on duty at night.” Skyjay said, turning to deal with the bathers who called him again.
With a cup of sugar water in his belly, Lin Zheng had strength.
The bathhouse was crowded, filled with the stench of men’s body odor and sweat, and Lin Zheng still felt a bit suffocated. Surrounded by a sea of white bodies, swimming in the misty vapor, like naked corpses floating in the water, he couldn’t find Tianjie,…
He felt an unwarranted emptiness. He felt that, in any case, the reunion of two people who had “wanted” and belonged to each other after such a long period of time should not be so boring, even though such mutual attachment could not really exist…
He wanted so much to forget and could not forget those days with Tianjie. He knew that it was a violation of the laws of heaven, and was treated as a beast of burden, but he felt that the desire that had grown in the haze at that time had gradually become like some kind of alien human cell, and had continued to multiply and fill up his own body, and had deeply penetrated into his own nerves and bone marrow, and had already turned into a different kind of blood that was different from other people’s that raged and surged and flowed through his body at all times.
He has suffered for this, afraid, and even took these as another self to curse severely. But as soon as the shadow of Tianjie appeared in front of his eyes, the hot blood was like a huge wave, swallowing up all those pains and fears in one go, leaving only a frustrated longing and imagination…
He wanted to find another close friend like Tianjie among his classmates, but he didn’t dare… There was indeed a classmate who looked like Tianjie, but he was not as versatile as Tianjie, and he was from the army and spoke in political jargon. He was the secretary of the Communist Youth League branch and a poor peasant of three generations, so he was always very angry when he lectured a classmate like Lin Zheng, who came from a family of “non-working people”.
Lin Zheng could not even avoid him, how could he dare to get close to him?
Lin Zheng could only comfort himself with the thought of meeting Tianjie again, and suppressed himself with tight self-control… That time, in anatomy class. At the sight of the human body lying on the dissection table, Lin Zheng could hardly contain himself and jumped on it. This was a young man, and every inch of his body resembled Tien Chieh’s, especially his features and the high bridge of his nose.
I heard that this is a death row inmate, is guilty of what evil was shot, the family did not dare to come out to collect the body, simply give it to the medical school.
When the scalpel in the hands of the lecturer cut into the young man’s body at the moment, Lin Zheng was actually like seeing Tianjie being killed, and even let out a mournful shriek of pain.
That very night, he snuck into the autopsy room.
He saw that the young man lying there was in pieces except for his arms and legs, which were still intact.
A dim lamp swayed, reflecting his turbulent form. Something was squeaking and biting, probably a mouse.
A great terror struck him, making his hair stand on end, and staring intently at the broken form of the young man, he fell back step by step, and then suddenly turned again and fled desperately.
He hid in a dark part of the campus, clenched his teeth and cried silently and hard for half the night, he didn’t know for whom? He felt that that peer, Tianjie, and himself, were all one fate, all being cut and sliced by others with a knife, one by one, until they were shattered and…
The next day, at the class meeting, the regimental secretary indeed criticized Lin Zheng by name, questioning which class feeling had been expressed in his shriek the day before. It was a capitalist son of a bitch who had taken counter-revolutionary revenge on his class brothers and deserved to die, and even death by a thousand cuts would not suffice. He asked Lin Zheng to dig deep into the roots of his thinking.
Lin Zheng mumbled, “I think he’s too young,…”
“This is bourgeois hypocritical humanitarian thinking, not the kind of feeling revolutionary youth should have. Chairman Mao teaches us that ‘there is no such thing as love without a reason,…'”
Lin Zheng didn’t care to listen to his impassioned speech, but he gazed at the high bridge of his nose, and… his heart flew far away, to Tianjie, who had stayed in his hometown and whom he had been thinking so hard about, and…
Today, meeting the Skyjay was a tedium created by actual hunger with no aftertaste.
“Are you better?” Skyjay turned to him again.
“It’s okay…”
“Why it’s fine, I see you’re puffy too.”
“Yes…”
Lin Zheng actually felt that there was nothing to say, and it seemed as if the white bodies around him were always pulling him and Tianjie around.
“If you’re not doing anything at night, come after nine o’clock, I’ll be on duty. You see,…” Tianjie looked around, “they’re busy, waiting for me to serve them,…”
Lin Zheng responded. When he left, Tianjie didn’t see him off.
（４）
Lin Zheng indulged in imagining meeting with Tianjie again in the evening.
At ten o’clock, he said he was going to see Tianjie, and the family didn’t stop him.
At that time, the night life belonging to the bourgeoisie had already been eliminated on the Chinese mainland, people in hunger early in order to conserve body heat into the quilt, the streets were as empty as the wilderness, a window now helplessly dark darkness, only the dim street lamps to Lin Zheng’s silhouette lengthened and shortened, shortened and lengthened again. As Lin Zheng walked along, he thought that all the white, flowery bodies that had nothing to do with them had disappeared, and that he and Tienjie could once again enjoy each other’s admiration, savor, exchange, and possession as they had done a year before, both of them dressing up in their own beautiful wickedness or innocence, and…
Tianjie, who opened the door for him, was still wearing only that bath towel.
There was no third person in the bath.
When Tianjie closed the store door behind him, Lin Zheng went to put his arm around him, but he gently pushed him away. With liquor spewing from his mouth, Tienjie walked into the tiny duty room, where there was a piece of boiled meat of some kind on the small table, an open packet of peanuts, and liquor, which by the smell of it was a bad, strong liquor,…
Tianjie tore off a piece of meat with his hand and handed it to Lin Zheng: “Eat, horse meat, it’s from an old patron,… Don’t look at me as a ‘lowly’ person, but it’s better than you, a university student, who is given wine and meat,…”
Lin Zheng took it and chewed on it, unable to say whether it was fishy or fragrant. He saw T’ien Chieh sitting on the bed with his knees in the bath towel, exposing his shameful parts. Tianjie had also lost weight, and the bridge of his nose was even more chiseled… Tianjie noticed his gaze and grinned: “Hey, college student, your future is important, you have to change your bourgeois mindset, and you mustn’t think about evil thoughts… Do you want to have a sip? No, I don’t want to corrupt you… Oh, I forgot to tell you, my mother has… tuberculosis, stage 3, she doesn’t have many days left…”
Lin Zheng stopped chewing, he felt that the Tianjie in front of him was a stranger, a stranger he had never seen before, and… “Why are you looking at me with such eyes? Don’t you recognize me? In fact, I haven’t changed, I have my father’s dirty blood, philandering, syphilis,…” Tien Chieh took a hard gulp of wine, hissing as if scalded, “I’m looking forward to… my mother being put out of her misery… She’s been labeled as a ‘Category 4’ person… She was put under the control of the street, sick, without a job or income, and depended only on me. Who can I rely on? Oh, listen to me, don’t come to see me again, young revolutionary, don’t make a mess instead of eating the mutton, there’s no need to…”
Gulp, another sip of shochu, another hissing inhale.
As Lin Zheng listened, he only felt that it was a sound from hell. He remembered the cup of sugar water during the day and the fingers of Tianjie pressing on his leg. He felt that that was Tianjie, and that what was in front of him was some demonic manifestation of Tianjie,…
“Eat, what are you waiting for?” Tianjie grabbed another handful of peanuts for him, “I’m telling the truth, I’ve seen it all, you should too, don’t learn from me, you have a bright path in front of you.”
At that moment, there was another soft call to the door.
“Fuck!” Tianjie cursed inadvertently, “It seems that today, I’m going to reveal all my ugly secrets to you. You sit on your… He, huh, is also an ugly type like me,…”
Tianjie went to open the door and led in a thin young man with big eyes, but empty and slightly stagnant.
He was visibly coy at the sight of Lin Zheng.
“My old classmate.” Tianjie introduced with a big grin.
The air was so dull it was breathless.
Instead, it was the youth who couldn’t stop striking up a conversation with Lin Zheng.
Tianjie drank glass after glass, and instead of giving up wine to these two, he just urged Lin Zheng, “Eat, eat…”
Lin Zheng really wanted to run away from this embarrassment, but he couldn’t bear to leave the Tianjie he had thought so hard about like this. He had a premonition, tonight’s breakup, afraid that will never be the same as before to get along.
The young man checked his face but became more and more animated, he couldn’t stop inquiring about the city where Lin Zheng went to school and what was going on at the university, and he even grabbed Tianjie’s glass of wine a few times to drink…
Lin Zheng wanted to urinate. The youth jumped up and enthusiastically tried to lead Lin Zheng to the restroom at the back of the store.
“Stop!” Tianjie suddenly drank them down with a hard-on as he pointed at Lin Zheng, “Piss right here! Pee!
Just pee in this house.”
The youth was mortified, “You’re going to drink it!”
“So what if I drink? It’s not all play in a man’s belly!”
Tianjie laughed and actually pulled Lin Zheng, “Really, it’s dark in the back, so I’ll pee in this room…”
Before Lin Zheng could say anything, the young man complained about Tianjie, “Why are you like this? You think people are like you…”
Unexpectedly, Tianjie was huffing and puffing to stand up and pull off the towel around his waist: “Are you looking at him again, want to get fucked? It’s easy, this game is ready-made, take off! You take it off first! I’ll give you whatever you want!”
┅┅
Lin Zheng had forgotten how he had fled through the door at that time. On the next day, Tianjie had a large bag of peanuts and a bag of sugar brought for Lin Zheng. However, from that day on, the two never saw each other again.
He couldn’t figure out what Tianjie’s “performance” that night (Lin Zheng had intuitively concluded that it was a play that Tianjie had intentionally put on for him) was intended to do? Was it Tianjie’s intention to make him feel disgusted, to make him feel sick, to make him forget the past and thus… to make him abandon his former self? It seemed like it, but not quite.
After returning to school, he wrote to Tianjie, urging him to pull himself together, but never received a reply from him. Did Tianjie no longer love him?
（５）
Another school year has passed.
Lin Zheng visits his family on vacation. He realizes that his family no longer mentions Tianjie as they once did, and he has a bad omen.
Sure enough, his father asked him, “Have you been in contact with Skyjay?”
He shook his head, he read that terrible foxiness in his father’s eye kozo.
“It’s good that there’s no contact,” my father almost mused, “I can’t believe that kid, he’s such a piece of material.”
“What happened to him?” Lin Zheng was startled.
“You… you’re also so old, I’m afraid you’ve heard of, hooligans, and, sodomy, and male ‘rabbits’
Sodomite. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. His mother… Unfortunately, she’s still sick, half-asleep, and has died a few times for him…”
“His mother is still alive?”
“It’s better to live and have such a son than to die, to save yourself the trouble and the embarrassment of being seen by others, alas…”
Lin Zheng felt a thunderbolt roll through his chest.
My father was still nagging me: “One has to know what is right and what is wrong. It’s good that you went to college, but I think he would have wanted to… if you hadn’t left… and he would have wanted to drag you into it too…”
How could this be the result? How could it come to such a conclusion?
He really wanted to say to his father, no! It’s not like that! There was no hypocrisy between us, there was no contempt, we… our feelings were sincere and pure, we respected each other, he didn’t harm me, I didn’t harm him, we just caressed each other’s shared beauty, our shared desire to appreciate each other in a way that no one else did, which we didn’t dare to desecrate, and our shared restlessness in our hearts, which no one else did!
If this is sin, we are all devils, devils who have not killed or maimed others, but have only given ourselves to each other, devils who have been transformed by the magic of the Divine in the underworld!
But he didn’t say anything.
Tianjie’s mother finds Lin Zheng and hands him a parcel, Tianjie’s diary written to Lin Zheng, which is expressed word by word and tear by tear; and a new dress. Before Tianjie left, he asked his mother to convey that Lin Zheng was studying very hard, and this new dress was given to him, and he didn’t need it anymore. It turns out that Tianjie is still deeply in love with Lin Zheng.
Lin Zheng clenched his teeth and cried silently for half the night. He thought again of the young man who had been cut to pieces by the scalpel. He always felt that that young man was not a corpse, but a living human being. Sure enough, the living Tianjie was actually cut up, and his own living heart was cut up.
Later, he found out that T’ien Chieh had been sent to the far northwestern desert to serve his sentence. And then, there was no sign of him…
He always thought of the undulating bare sand dunes and imagined Tianjie suffering there. The Tianjie he imagined was not the haggard Tianjie in prison uniform or the Tianjie with an old bath towel around his waist, but the Tianjie of a teenager, the Tianjie who danced the “Sailor’s Dance” in a vigorous manner, the Tianjie who recited Gorky’s “Sea Swallows” in a soaring and emotional manner. Tianjie danced and sang like that, but he was buried by the wind and sand, and his heart died in half.
He has since become a better behaved person to those around him. He no longer kept to himself, he no longer distanced himself from his classmates when they joked about sex, he no longer was even indifferent to his interactions with female classmates, and he enthusiastically participated in all group activities, including discussions on the “Class Struggle”, and he even took the initiative of approaching the secretary of the Youth League to report on his thinking and to ask for his opinion, and…
All the way up to that Xingtai earthquake where he desperately scrambled to join the medical team, he pushed his brilliance to the top.
He graduated, he was assigned to the most prestigious first-class hospital, he accepted the girl’s advances, and he got married as a matter of course.
He seemed to have completely forgotten about Tianjie and his time with him, and calmed the restlessness in his heart.
He married at the age of 28, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a period of unprecedented devastation.
His grandfather had been a buyer for an old foreign bank and his political honor at the time of the Xingtai earthquake had grafted on him an unexpected result – the rebels did not rely on him and could not make him the object of their struggle, but the business of the hospital could not be separated from him, and he was only active in expressing a revolutionary attitude, but he was able to gain a rare transcendence which he did not have to actually devote himself to. He was just actively expressing a revolutionary attitude, but he was able to secure a rare degree of transcendence without actually committing himself.
For a while, he was tired and had surgeries every day, even a few in a day.
It seems that even he himself recognized such a life. With busyness and exhaustion, all of his mental space, like the foundation of the ground like a solid, leaving not the slightest gap.
He actually gradually also recognized that what happened between himself and Tianjie was absurd, and he gradually recognized that he had stepped out of the alien.
Only, he also found an abnormal feeling between himself and his wife, he could not ignite his passion for women. He loved his wife, love her clean, quiet, skilful, hardworking, he is satisfied with his wife after the well-organized life, but he has a kind of indifference to lovemaking, he was even afraid of touching his wife’s body’s soft and slippery, afraid of smelling his wife’s body of the female slightly fishy body odor, he did not inspire a male offensive possession of the impulse, he felt that Tianjie’s solid and rich in strength of elasticity of muscles, that some stinky salty body odor, especially the courageous strong possession of a strong embrace, he nestled in the strong possession of a powerful embrace, he was not able to ignite his own passion for women. He felt that it was only with Tianjie’s firm, elastic muscles, his slightly salty body odor, and especially with his strong, possessive and forceful embrace, when he snuggled up in his strong and powerful embrace, and felt the power of his attack when he “wanted” him like a lion in a frenzy, that he felt the comfort of clinging to a strong person, and the relief and pleasure of being taken in by a protector of his soul,…
Making love to his wife, every time, he was erotically frustrated by this abnormality in himself and the resulting guilt he felt towards his wife.
But he tried to do it, he even took some nourishing herbs in advance, those dark Chinese pills, he even tried to take the initiative himself, imagining in the dark, teasing his own excitement, he even rubbed his body to imagine it, but every time he imagined it, it was always those virtual women transformed into Tianjie and the imaginary homosexuals who were so cool that they were like Tianjie, and…
I don’t know whether his understanding wife also realized that he was different, but three days and two days to go to the night shift, or go back to his mother’s home.
Lin Zheng is very guilty, he tried to make himself detoxify that solitude, like a schoolboy with a lot of effort to complete the homework assigned by the teacher, to do for his wife as a woman wants to be a husband like a man.
Originally, Lin Zheng thought that he would go on like this day by day smoothly, he thought, as long as there is another child, his wife’s heart will inevitably be put on the child for the most part, and he will be able to relax a large chunk of his own to cope with it.
Unexpectedly, things took a sharp turn for the worse.
（６）
One day, he was on the night shift, and he went to the basement storage room, which contained a large number of human anatomical specimens, to retrieve something. Outside that storage room was a square hall with a ping-pong table, where people used to go to play ping-pong during their usual breaks.
That day, in the late fall season, it was raining lightly, and the night wind was already carrying a somewhat offensive chill.
Wrapped in a purple cotton hospital robe, Lin Zheng still winced at the chill that came over him as he stepped out of the building.
He stepped into the basement and saw, with a glance, that on the ping-pong table that greeted the door there was, in fact, a boy curled up, also wrapped only in a robe worn by a patient.
The boy, also awakened, rolled over and sat up with a start.
“Mr. Lim,…” the boy greeted him timidly.
He recognized him as one of a group of medical students who had been assigned to the hospital as interns before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Since he was not in the surgical department, he recognized him but was not familiar with him.
“Why are you sleeping here?” Lin Zheng asked him.
Instead, he kept his head down and sulked.
Under a dim lamp, Lin Zheng watched as his face showed a pallor that shouldn’t be there at his age, and his body was shivering slightly.
Lin Zheng could see that underneath the bulky cotton robe was the body of a long, elegant boy with large, deep-set, melancholy eyes, and, to Lin Zheng’s delight, a nose like that of a celestial king’s…
A wave of pity ran and rushed through Lin Zheng’s chest.
“Why are you sleeping here? It’s so cold…”
After Lin Zheng’s persistent questioning, the intern mumbled and told him that his home had been raided by the Red Guards and that the Red Guards had used it as a stronghold, gathering dozens of different kinds of “evil spirits” at his home. The Red Guards gathered dozens of families of all sorts of “evil spirits” together at his home, and held meetings, marches, and pleadings, and on the first day he was also punished by kneeling down all night, and then he was allowed to go back to the hospital, but he didn’t dare to go home again, and…
Lin Zheng’s heart wrenched.
He embraced this intern’s shoulder, “Go to my duty room and squeeze in, it’s worse when you’re freezing sick.”
The intern’s eyes glistened with tears, but she insisted on declining.
“Let’s go, let’s go, say what you will, you’re still a student, just draw a line in the sand mentally with your family. You shouldn’t have to suffer like this, and the Party’s policy doesn’t have this…”
He persuaded, cajoled, and brought the intern to the duty room.
There was only a single bed in the room. Lin Zheng asked him to sleep peacefully on the bed, but he said that he was on duty and would not sleep, so who knew what would happen in the night?
Instead, the intern shrunk himself to the inside of the bed and forced him to lie down, resting or not.
He lay down, and the bed was so narrow that the two had to squeeze together in reverse to fight through their feet.
Lin Zheng turned out the lights.
There was a burst of miserable moaning coming, it was a patient with advanced liver cancer in the internal medicine ward downstairs, the patient was only in his thirties, he always wanted his mother to guard him, he was tortured by severe pain and despair to the point that his sanity was a bit out of whack, as long as his mother wasn’t around, he cried out desperately, “Mom, mom, mom, mom, you don’t care about me anymore!”
This shouting gradually ceased, and it was not known whether the patient had finally exhausted his life, or whether he had been given a shot of pain-relieving and sleeping medicine.
Lin Zheng rolled over, and the intern shrank back in.
Hayashi Masaru rested his skeleton on the intern’s quilt-covered leg, his arm receiving an imperceptible shudder.
“The boy is frightened and freezing…”
His hand went under the covers and he felt the coldness of the intern’s feet. He took those feet in his hands, and he pressed his face to the covers. He would have liked to just fall asleep, but, through the covers, he caught what seemed like a strong whiff of that long-lost boy’s body odor, and he was struck by it.
He couldn’t help but pull the covers so that the intern’s feet were exposed to the edge of the covers and put his face against them.
“Stinks!” The intern said timidly as she tried to retract her foot.
He pulled back and he said, “Go to sleep!” But pressed his face closer.
The intern didn’t move a muscle.
He sniffed greedily at the intern’s true body odor.
He heard the intern forcefully suppressing a sob.
The struggle like a beast coming out of its cage and the pain like a knife stabbing his heart caused the fire that had burned with Tianjie to reignite in Lin Zheng’s body. His mind became blank, only the tongues of fire licking his violently throbbing heart one by one.
The night went by.
He was the only one in the house at the time because his wife was “sending doctors to the countryside”. The next day, he took the initiative to go to the intern and asked him to sleep with him for a few days, so that he could return home every day as normal after the “Red Guards” had left his house.
In fact, Lin Zheng has no non-extravagance, he loves and pities this intern who is six years younger than him and still belongs to his brother.
He found that the boy had a beauty that attracted his love and pity, but also had an undeserved torment that attracted his sourness – he could not see that. He had seen Cao Yu’s famous play, Thunderstorm, and he could accept the destruction of others, but the death of Zhou Chong, the second young master, was so hard that he could not rest for days, and he could not accept the destruction of a male life like that.
Although Lin Zheng was regarded as a “teacher”, in the end, he was the same age, and he really had no other way to think, so the intern accepted Lin Zheng’s arrangement after expressing his gratitude.
Lin Zheng was caught up in a kind of exuberance, cooking for him, boiling hot water for him, making his bed, and taking his own undershirt and underwear for him to change into.
Sleep came, and the quiet darkness enveloped them.
The intern obediently let him clutch his hand, gradually wrapping himself around Lin Zheng, he nestled his face into Lin Zheng’s chest, his voice trembling as he said, “Teacher Lin, you’re so nice.”
With a breath, Lin Zheng’s whole body burned with the fire of sin that he thought had been completely extinguished. He did not want to say anything, he did not want to say anything, he only felt that having such a homosexual life was the best fulfillment in the world, and… From then on, he had a second “Tien Jie”.
However, disaster struck.
A surprisingly stupid intern was jealous of Hayashi’s favoritism towards him as a classmate, and went so far as to make an issue of it. He had been quietly observing and pursuing him for a long time (at the time, how this student, who was stupid in his schoolwork, could trigger sensitivity at the age of twenty-something to such things that people at the time could rarely think of was a mystery that Hayashi Masayoshi would later find very subtle).
Finally, in a windy night, he brought people to the duty room in the naked embrace sleep Lin Zheng and the intern caught “adultery”.
Lin Zheng was sent to this rural health center, the intern was sent back to his impoverished home in Huaibei, and their personnel files were loaded with the heavy cross they would have to carry for life – “morally corrupt hooligans.”
The wife calmly broke up with Lin Zheng.
When faced with the emaciated wife, Lin Zheng did not say anything. And his wife did not like other women, to him to pour out insults and curses, his wife just said, she has been early to notice, but wishful thinking not to the bad side. Wife painfully asked him: “you which aspects are outstanding, why do you prefer this? How can a man sway you more than a woman? As a man, how could you bury your future for someone who is also a man? Is it possible that everything you showed me before was hypocrisy? Can you give me an understanding…”
Lin Zheng couldn’t give her an understanding, Lin Zheng couldn’t even give an understanding to himself,… (7)
In a flash, more than twenty years have passed.
Lin Zheng’s heart, which had been half dead for Tianjie, was all but dead.
Fortunately, this was only a rural health center, a semi-enclosed environment with semi-enclosed people. Apart from going to work and attending clinics, Lin Zheng returned to his own dormitory, where he didn’t have to go shopping for his daily necessities, and he didn’t bother to do so either; except for some essential food, he couldn’t think of anything that was still essential, and for more than a decade he wore his long outdated blue polyester uniform, blue cotton overcoat, and old gray tweed cap. He had no interest in dressing himself or decorating his room. He had no flowers, plants, fish or insects, and his only pastimes were a semiconductor radio and a small nine-inch black-and-white TV that he used for more than a decade…
He lived like that for over twenty years.
He did not go to fight for a long salary, do not go to fight for the evaluation of the title, nothing to fight for, nothing to want, he just seriously to the patient treatment, only when there is no patient, he felt the disappointment of his own heart – a person in the world to feel what are superfluous disappointment.
The years scrubbed him, but also scrubbed around – he was actually evaluated twice on the lowest level of “advanced”, received back a certificate of appreciation, a mirror engraved in the center of the word “award” mirror.
He was calm about it. It seems that this calmness also caused others to lose their enthusiasm for him, and he was never selected again.
He thought it was nice to be treated with indifference as if someone else was ignoring his existence.
Unexpectedly, this unintentionally appearing teenage patient, Qin Yang, had triggered his emotional world again, just like when he found that intern sleeping on the ping-pong table in the basement, and that cool nose resembling Tianjie’s had rapidly heated up the love and compassion that was not difficult to understand at his age, and pushed forward towards his own kind of unspoken emotion,… So, the heart that he had been pursuing hadn’t died yet!
┅┅
The alarm clock on the desk went off sharply.
His thoughts were interrupted when he realized it was eleven noon. He had set the alarm clock last night; he didn’t want to make lunch, and he was afraid of sleeping through the opening time of the hospital’s small cafeteria after his night shift. The cafeteria was too small, with only one old woman hired to temporarily cook for about ten people, and if he missed the time, there would be nothing to eat.
He picked up his lunch box and rushed to get his meal. Going out of the door, with a shock in his heart, he remembered Qin Yang again. In the morning, he rushed back in a panic and forgot to instruct Qin Yang’s buddies that Qin Yang should absolutely fast these days. At this moment, when it was time for Qinyang to wake up and the nurses to eat, Lin Zheng was really afraid that the ignorant wage earners would kindly feed Qinyang something… He didn’t bother to fetch food, and almost jogged to the ward and…
Qin Yang did wake up, without those companions, staring at the ceiling alone.
He met Lin Zheng and reluctantly made a small smile.
“Does it hurt?” Lin Zheng carefully examined the IV tubes, catheters, and negative pressure tubes on his body, and… “It doesn’t hurt.” Qin Yang said weakly.
“Hungry? Remember, you should not take a bite of anything without me saying that you should eat and what to eat. You can take a sip of water to moisten your mouth,…” said Lin Zheng, but he realized that there was nothing on the small cupboard above Qin Yang’s bed, “Oh, have your companion bring in a glass of water, a towel, toothpaste and a toothbrush or something,… later, I’ll bring you a glass of water first, and a straw, so that if you are able to do it by yourself, you can take a sip of the water, not a big gulp, just to moisten your Throat,…”
“Dr. Lin, let him use this.” An old patient next to Qin Yang curtly presented a glass canning jar to Lin Zheng.
Lin Zheng thanked him, but he was still giving Qin Yang some advice, when he saw tears coming to his eyes,… “What’s wrong? Don’t be sad. Everyone gets sick sometimes. In a few days, you won’t have to suffer anymore,…”
“The boy, with a heavy heart.” That old patient sighed.
Lin Zheng bent down and scraped Qin Yang’s nose with his finger, “There’s no flaming mountain you can’t cross, is there? Just tell us if you have any difficulties, we’ll help you,…”
Qin, however, bit his lip and held back his tears.
“Well, well,…” said Lim Jung, soothing him some more and turning around to fetch his meal.
“Dr. Lin,…” Qin Yang, however, called out to him again, “You, are my savior, I… I… I… I can’t lie to you,…”
“Cheat? Cheat what cheat?”
“They… won’t come back…”
“Them? Who?”
“I… I don’t have any money… I can only come up with twelve hundred dollars… This illness of mine is going to cost a lot, isn’t it? I’ve heard that the deposit for hospitalization costs four thousand dollars, and I can’t afford to…”
“Oh,…” said Lin Zheng, hearing his subtext that the wage earners were afraid that the hospital would ask for money from them and did not dare to show their faces again.
He laughed bitterly in his heart. Could it be that the heavens in the underworld refused to let go of him, and had to make him fall back into an entanglement with a homosexual teenager, a kind of indescribable and confusing entanglement?
Obviously, Qin Yang had summoned up enough courage to confide the truth to himself, even putting his own life on the line, when he had just finished surgery and still needed a lot of treatment and care. Qin Yang could think that because he had told the truth, it was highly likely that he would lead to hasty treatment and be hurriedly sent out of the hospital ah!
Lin Zheng’s heart was unsettled.
He looked at Qin Yang almost mesmerized, and only after a long time did he say, “Thank you for trusting me so much. Money, don’t think about it, don’t worry, just get well yourself and…”
“Dr. Lin, I… as long as I don’t get ‘fired’ by my boss after I’m discharged from the hospital, I’ll pay back the money I owe the hospital,…”
“Don’t worry! I told you, you don’t have to think about the money.”
“Alas,…” that old patient sighed again and said to Lin Zheng, “It’s not easy to work away from home, it’s not easy, he’s afraid of being fired by his boss, they… work, there’s no protection,…”
Lin Zheng’s heart cut like a knife pain. He had already realized how much suffering the ailing Qin Yang was carrying in his life, and to subject such an honest young man to so much suffering triggered a hidden pain in Lin Zheng’s heart, a hidden pain in his heart, a hidden pain in his heart that…
Lin Zheng even felt the compulsion of the heavens in the underworld, and he did not know whether the heavens had sent this Qin Yang for him to plunge him back into the fire of rekindled sins, or to let him share in the suffering that Qin Yang had endured, so that this teenager could find some relief.
He thought it was the latter.
“Recuperate at ease, don’t think about anything, oh, no need to fret, let me see what I can think of.” Lin Zheng said, stroking Qin Yang’s somewhat sweaty hair and wiping away the tears on Qin Yang’s face.
（８）
He walked out of the hospital room, his heart heavy.
“Lin, what’s the matter? You didn’t get any food? I haven’t eaten yet, let’s go and have a meal at a small restaurant outside, my treat,…”
Dr. Zhao, who was also in the surgery department, saw Lin Zheng’s sad face holding an empty lunch box and greeted him warmly.
Lin Zheng just arrived at the hospital, he was twelve years old Zhao Dafu is just a doorway into the hospital in the pharmacy to help get the medicine of the children. Zhao Dafu is very good at learning, scheming, see the health center to a famous medical school, and in the city of first-class hospital “knife” of the authentic surgeon, and Lin Zheng deliberately close to him as a teacher to learn the technology. Lin Zheng also teach him with all his heart, the relationship between the two in the hospital extraordinarily close.
Zhao Dafu is thin and withered, shrewd and campy. Lin Zheng and him, after all, never had the same fluctuations in feelings as Tianjie.
Seeing that Dr. Zhao wanted to buy dinner, Lin Zheng declined, but Dr. Zhao refused a hundred times. Dr. Zhao was such a person, his enthusiasm had a high viscosity, especially when he invited people to dinner – he never asked for receipts for meals in restaurants, and then caught a patient who was doing something for the head and head, and gave him a lot of warm hospitality, including doing a physical examination that was not necessary, and prescribing some tonic medicines that had nothing to do with treating the disease, and then letting people reimburse him for the receipt. Then, when he caught a patient who was a head of mind, he gave them a warm reception, including a physical examination that was not necessary, and prescribed some tonic medicines that had nothing to do with curing their illnesses. He can always squeeze out a bitter face: “so little salary, no way, more friends, more socializing, no way, because of this, his wife is divorced!”
When Lin Zheng refused, he picked him up and walked away, “Old Lin, you’re such a deadbeat, these days you don’t eat for nothing, and who doesn’t eat for nothing? Go, go,…”
In front of the hospital, the director of the inpatient department met Lin Zheng and reminded him that the patient named Qin Yang had only paid 500 yuan last night, and he told Lin Zheng to urge the patient to pay the deposit quickly.
“Oh, I forgot, they gave me the money, I’ll turn it in this afternoon.” Lin Zheng responded, he thought, in the afternoon, he went to the bank to withdraw his deposit, four thousand dollars, to himself is not yet hurt, spend to Qin Yang, seems to be an extra comfort.
At the dinner table, he told Dr. Zhao about Qin Yang’s fear of being “fired” by his boss because of his illness.
Dr. Zhao shook his head indifferently, “These days, when the father dies and the mother marries, everyone takes care of everyone, so who cares so much about eating,…”
However, Rinzheng stubbornly stared into his eyes, “However, this matter, I want to manage,…”
“Oh…” Dr. Chiu was slightly stunned, then smiled wryly, “I can’t just ignore your buddy’s business… That kid, he’s lucky to have stumbled and fallen in front of the Bodhisattva, who thought he was kowtowing to him…”
When Dr. Zhao heard that Qin Yang was working in a private food factory, he looked relieved: “Don’t worry, buddy, I’ll take care of it. I’ll send Old Liu from the Epidemic Prevention Station, and not only will the boss not dare to say ‘no’, but from now on he’ll have to treat this Qin kid as an ‘amulet’…”. talisman’…”
“There’s no need to be so alarmed…”
“You don’t have to worry about it. However, there’s a daughter-in-law of a ‘money man’ in a village 40 miles away who has rheumatoid arthritis, and she’s a relative of Old Liu from the Epidemic Prevention Station, so you should go and take a look at her one day,…”
“Alright, you arrange it!” Lin Zheng was laughing in his heart, that’s how Zhao Dafu was, working like a businessman, always having something to exchange. However, Zhao gave Lin Zheng a big shout out to the outside world, and every time he asked Lin Zheng to pull some strings for him to go to see a doctor, he changed from the casual way he was in the hospital, and respectfully addressed him as “Mr. Lin” or “Mr. Lin”. -Zhao took this opportunity to add value to his behavior.
“Not to mention, this Qin kid is a popular and pretty boy… Lao Lin, you’re his savior, so if you like him, take him as your godson, depending on whether or not he’s lucky enough to be his godson…”
Dr. Zhao said it casually like a joke.
Lin Zheng, however, shivered in his heart. He suddenly realized that Dr. Zhao had come from the days of the health center, so he might have heard something about why he had been sent to the health center, and he wondered if he was saying something else about himself,…
Zhao Dafu, however, said something else with a big grin and chewed uncontrollably.
“Is it because I’m too sensitive?” Lin Zheng couldn’t help but laugh at himself.
He recalled that not long ago, he went to a meeting of the Health Bureau, actually met his wife who had been separated for eighteen years. He felt embarrassed, but his ex-wife said to him bashfully, “It’s so fast, we’re all at this age, we’re all old, and at this age, we can only take more care of ourselves and live well!”
In fact, and his ex-wife of the same age is not old, full of black hair, the face does not have an obvious wrinkles, on the body of the reddish-red cape-style cashmere trench coat and neck fluttering with the large large mixed-color peony flowers of the silk scarf, but also overflowing with her body of that unfailing vitality and charm.
Lin Zheng understood that it was his ex-wife who saw that he was truly senile.
He also heard that his ex-wife’s words are not only comforting, there are also sighs and reminders, just because they have reached this age, these are also drenched in years of frustration and helplessness.
Yes, yes, he is already close to the age of old age, should be the heart like a dry well, people like a haggard wood to live in a lingering life. As the saying goes, “moral integrity”, and himself from the moment he and Tianjie violated the rules of the heavens, is destined to this life, no matter how to do, will not become a moral gentleman. What’s more, there was the subsequent exposure, and there was the record in the personnel file that was destined to be accompanied by the shame that could not be burned off even if he was sent to the crematorium!
Now, Qin Yang, the unknown but loveable teenager intruded, and like an elf, he cast a net with a feeling that Lin Zheng himself couldn’t tell, not to capture the present Lin Zheng, but to capture Lin Zheng’s restless heart that he thought was dead.
What will this lead to?
Lin Zheng secretly let out a long breath, he is at this age anyway, what else will there be, since he has already induced a liking for Qin Yang, he will be willing to do it for him, as long as there will not be the kind of contact that tramples cuteness into filth, his heart will burn once more for this bitter love, burned, I’m afraid that it will always be the flying ashes, and there is no possibility of rekindling.
“People are still alive, but their hearts will never die.” Remembering these words, which always reminded people not to relax their vigilance against “class enemies” in the era of “class struggle as a program,” he secretly smiled bitterly.
After eating, he hurriedly picked up some essential items and brought them to Qinyang. Knowing that Qinyang’s temperature had risen, he wrote a prescription and asked the nurse to add anti-inflammatory medication, then hurried to the bank to withdraw money to pay for Qinyang’s medical bills… When he returned to his hut, it was already twilight…. He realized that he was very tired. He wanted to take a rest, but fell asleep and woke up only when someone came to call him, without having any of the messy dreams that he often had.
Qin Yang’s temperature continues to be high.
He was busy rushing to the ward, urgent blood tests, injection of drugs, he personally added ice packs, two or three hours later, the drugs took effect, Qin Yang’s body temperature dropped, and peacefully fell asleep.
It only occurred to Lin Zheng that he hadn’t eaten dinner.
After hurriedly making two packets of instant noodles, he found out Qin Yang’s case record again and considered the plan for the next day’s drug delivery.
One day, two days, three days, Qin Yang’s condition was recovering better and better each day… Lin Zheng bought him drinks, Lin Zheng helped him to walk on the ground, Lin Zheng made chicken soup for him, and… The first thing that the nurses reported when they met with Lin Zheng was also Qin Yang’s condition.
The owner of the factory where Qin Yang worked also brought gifts to visit, specially to thank Lin Zheng. But he didn’t mention the money, nor did he sing the vain praises of “helping people to be happy”. When Dr. Zhao went to him, he said that Qin Yang was the child of a relative of Mr. Lin, a highly qualified surgical specialist in the hospital, and that he had come to visit him in order to pull strings.
What Lin Zheng felt was a different kind of fulfillment.
Especially when he helped Qin Yang to walk down to the ground, Qin Yang unconsciously had to rely on him, he felt the pleasure of a lovely homosexual teenager’s life being cared for by himself. When Qin Yang smiled slightly shyly and guiltily to thank him, he looked at Qin Yang’s slightly concave pair of large kozo eyes, Qin Yang’s moving high nose, Qin Yang’s vibrant smile swirls, the
The heart just overflows with indescribable gladness and comfort.
Every time he checked Qin Yang’s wounds, it gave him the satisfaction of appreciating the beauty of Qin Yang’s robust life. He felt a strange possessive satisfaction. Only, he restrained himself from an urge to kiss him, to embrace him, but he restrained himself.
（９）
Qin Yang recovered quickly and was already able to move around on the ground.
He realized what Lin Zheng had done for him. But he was a mute child, and he tried many times to say something warmly grateful to Lin Zheng, but when he opened his mouth, his face turned red and he was incoherent.
Lin Zheng then smiled and barred him, he didn’t want to hear it, he read the sincerity in Qin Yang’s eye kozo and he felt it was enough.
That day, Lin Zheng was dragged by Dr. Zhao to see Old Liu’s relatives at the epidemic prevention station, and after going all day, he returned to the hospital and rushed to the ward to see Qin Yang.
Instead, Qin Yang sat in the hallway looking toward the door waiting for him.
Almost unconsciously, Qin Yang took hold of him, “I… I’ve been thinking about you for a day,…” As he said this, tears welled up in his eyes, and Lin Zheng’s heart felt hot and inexplicably soft.
“Have you eaten?” Lin Zheng asked him.
“……. “Qin Yang nodded, and he thoughtfully grasped Lin Zheng’s hand for a long time before he raised his head with a flushed face, “Doctor Lin, I… I… I don’t know if it’s a high compliment or not, but I… I’d like to recognize you as… as my uncle-daddy…”
The warm current washed over Lin Zheng, who was intoxicated with excitement, “Yes, yes, I’ll…”
“But, when there’s no one else around, I… I want to call you… Dad…”
“Ah,…” Lin Zheng was so embraced by the sudden burst of happiness that he couldn’t say anything but patted Qin Yang’s shoulder.
“Dad, from now on, even if I go as far as the sky, I won’t be able to forget your great kindness,…”
“Good boy, don’t say anything, don’t say anything.”
Yes, nothing more needs to be said. For eighteen years, Lin Zheng had lived alone, his love dying, and now that he had love again, the true love of a living, same-sex being for him, even though Qinyang regarded him as a father, even though there was that insurmountable barrier that he had restrained himself from, the Qinyang that he loved loved him, too, a reverential love that he hadn’t dared to hope for, and that had finally appeared after eighteen years, he felt contented,… “Qin Yang, an injection,…” a nurse called from the hospital room.
Qin Yang responded, biting her lip and smiling as she walked towards the hospital room.
Lin Zheng felt that the most loathsome person in the world was the nurse who had shouted away Qin Yang.
Again, he laughed at the thought. He was confused by the sudden happiness that had come to him.
For a few more days, when there was no one else around, Qin Yang intoxicatingly and affectionately called Lin Zheng, “Dad…”.
He had no other way of controlling the love he felt for Lin Zheng in return for his kindness, nor did he have any other way of expressing his feelings about the care he received from a strange elder whom he had never dared to ask for as he was living alone in a sea of people… Moreover, this care was given to him by a strange and honorable elder at a time when he was in danger and helpless… His conversations with him were unrestrained… he talked about the poverty in his hometown, the anguish of having dropped out of school, and the hardships of going out to work… and so on. He talked about the hardships of going out to work. He had suffered many hernia attacks, but this time he had endured them until he was left to struggle alone in the bleak and dilapidated shed. At first, he knew how to cry, but later, drowsiness and sometimes life-threatening pain kept him awake. He wished he could die of the pain all at once, so as to save himself the trouble of living, and… time and again, this made Lin Zheng’s love for him boil over even more.
He is clear that his love for Qin Yang is not only emotional, and restless heart, physical love. But he restrained, he knew that he was not the Lin Zheng of that year, Qin Yang was not the Tianjie of that year, he could love like lovers with Tianjie, and now, the love that had atrophied for eighteen years was resurrected, and he was willing to love like his fathers – no matter what, to be able to love what he loved; this love had been shut down for eighteen years, imprisoned for eighteen years, and was finally released ; no matter what, eighteen years without love was changed by Qin Yang.
On this day, it was once again the night shift for Lin Zheng.
When Dr. Zhao handed over his shift to him, he seemed to remind him inadvertently, “Lao Lin, I think, that Qin Yang, it’s almost time to be discharged from the hospital, what you did for him is enough to buy him as your… book boy!”
“Oh,…” Lin Zheng’s heart snapped, “Yes, yes, you… just arrange for him to be discharged,…”
“Okay, I’ll make the arrangements then. You buddy can rest assured as much as you want.”
Lin Zheng felt like he had been knocked out by a loud thunderbolt, and he had noticed something strange in Doctor Zhao’s reminder from Doctor Zhao’s smile – he had indeed neglected the once upon a time for a while.
He wanted to turn to the ward again and tell Qin Yang about his discharge, but he felt that there were suddenly more watchful eyes behind him, and he cowered for no reason, so he had to go back to his dormitory.
He recalled his contact with Qin Yang somewhat nervously, he actually felt that he had made another indecent move that was discovered by someone else, he cleared it in his memory, no, nothing!
The memory, however, spread like an overturned bucket of water.
He thought of the intern who had slept in the basement, who had been repatriated to the countryside after the accident, and whose bright future had gone down the drain; and even more so, he thought of Tianjie, a handsome and versatile man who had stumbled and wasted his life on the endless desert hills.
Qin Yang should not have ended up like this. In front of his eyes, a young man’s body that was as moist and clean as white jade, as fit as the famous sculpture “David”, and as sacred as a flying messenger – he couldn’t tell whether it was Qin Yang or the teenagers he had once adored.
Qin Yang should live better than them. Lin Zheng thought that it was wise that Qin Yang should be discharged from the hospital.
Thinking. Someone knocked on the door. The one who came was Qin Yang.
He was full of joy, “Dr. Zhao told me that I can be discharged from the hospital today, and I have no problem going back to work in the food factory.”
“Yes, everything is fine, it’s time to be discharged.” Lin Zheng pulled him down side by side.
But Qin Yang was shy again, his voice was quiet and mysterious: “Dad, I… I want to ask you something…” Lin Zheng’s heart skipped a beat because of his shyness, and he felt Qin Yang’s gaze burning, so he didn’t dare to look at him directly: “What is it?”
“I… I want to ask, I heard people say,… I wonder, does this disease… affect fertility?”
“What? What?” Lin Zheng was confused.
“I’ve heard people say that this disease can… affect fertility.”
Lin Zheng was puzzled, “What do you… have a bad feeling about?”
“No, no…” Qin Yang shook her head, her face blushing even more, “I was just scared when I heard someone say that, and I’ve been wanting to ask you about it, but it’s hard to talk about it, and… in fact, in the past few days, I’ve tried it, and it’s quite… quite normal, and…”
In a trance Lin Zheng felt even more confused: “You tried, what did you try?”
Qin Yang’s face turned even more scarlet: “Don’t laugh at me, I tried to… masturbate, and it felt quite normal,…”
Hearing this, Lin Zheng couldn’t help but shake his head and burst out laughing, “You, you, otherwise normal, inexplicable…”
Qin Yang was actually suddenly so shy that she buried her face in Lin Zheng’s chest.
Lin Zheng embraced him, and Lin Zheng felt an indescribable sacredness that a lovely being like Qin Yang should live everything well, as it should be!
Qin Yang accepted his hug cozily and actually cried quietly, “You are too good to me, I don’t know how to repay you.”
Tears also welled up in Lin Zheng’s eyes as he bent his head down and couldn’t help but gently kiss Qin Yang’s forehead, “Don’t repay me, it’s enough to remember that there was an old man named Lin,…”
Qin Yang raised his head and accepted his kiss, and he couldn’t help but go back to kissing the bridge of Qin Yang’s nose, which he had wanted to kiss so many times…
Qin Yang was murmuring, “I really don’t know what to do for you, I can never forget you, you really love me more than my real parents. I know that you are not willing to formally accept me as your son, the custom of the common people, you think it is vulgar. When I have a son, he’ll be able to call you ‘Grandpa’ properly, Dad, right? …”
“Yes, yes, you will definitely live better than me! Definitely,…”
Lin Zheng also murmured as he felt himself breaking free of the heaviness in his heart, he kissed Qin Yang obliviously, and he thought to himself that letting Qin Yang out of the hospital was indeed the wisest thing to do.
(End of full text)