The Long Night - Chapter 39

That day, a heavy snow fell. The clean, new snow hadn’t been stepped on by anyone yet. Outside the window was a vast expanse of white.

The world was covered in pure white by the new snow, but its interior had long been washed into gray.

Yan Liao stared blankly at the screen. The people who once praised him for being “authentic” were now saying he was arrogant, condescending, and uncultured. His acquaintances donned the cloak of “informed sources,” starting with, “I think there was something like this,” and pieced together fragmented bits to form a complete but flawed person.

A photo of him blocking Sheng Lin at the art exhibition was a screenshot. At that moment, Sheng Lin’s hand and his hand overlapped at an ambiguous angle, as if they were holding hands.

That video that Shen Yi-ran said, “Let’s use the hype to promote the exhibition, and we’ll explain later,” was never clarified. Finally, it led to a conclusion that everyone who saw it was suddenly enlightened by: it was a love triangle over a woman. But soon, another account posted, suspecting that Yan Liao was gay and provided a lot of secretly taken evidence.

The photos were of two blurry figures who were excessively close, as if they were kissing. Because of Yan Liao’s distinct fashion style, it was obvious that it was him.

The anonymous source claimed that Yan Liao was gay and was also involved in a messy entanglement with a woman. The previous arrogant and domineering statements could be chalked up to a personality flaw, but now, it was a complete moral decay.

The whole thing was quickly concluded. The first comment under the trending topic was, “Does he have AIDS?”

Yan Liao’s reaction was apathetic and calm. More than this calmness, Tang Shaocheng wanted to see him vent his feelings and cry loudly, to see him bawl his eyes out like a child who had been wronged.

But Yan Liao just stood there, leaning against the door frame in a daze, his eyes a cold emptiness that refocused only when he saw Tang Shaocheng.

Yan Liao was used to seeing an all-encompassing expression on Tang Shaocheng’s face, one that could tolerate anything that happened. In the past, he had deliberately created accidents, wanting to see some kind of emotional fluctuation from this person, and preferably to see him lose control because of him. But now, he saw a crack in Tang Shaocheng’s expression and wanted to glue it back together.

“Let me handle it myself. Don’t get involved,” Yan Liao said in a low voice.

The office was warmed by the air conditioner. Shen Yi-ran and Chen Zheng-xi sat opposite each other on either side of a rosewood desk. The potted green plant on the desk was thriving, with small pink and white flowers blooming, completely unaffected by the cold winter outside the window.

“Let’s not do that yet… I’m not saying we won’t, but can we wait a little longer?”

Shen Yi-ran was always a gentle person with almost no temper. Even now, when he was expressing his opposition, he spoke in a soft voice.

Chen Zheng-xi glanced at him, his eyes filled with mockery. “Didn’t we already decide at the restaurant that day? How could I be willing to cut down this money tree?”

In the five minutes that Yan Liao was absent from the room that day, Chen Zheng-xi had already made all the plans. Now, every step was proceeding in an orderly fashion. He bent his finger and tapped the table. “I’ve also arranged for a few live-streaming accounts to release some more information. Once this wave of traffic passes, we can start selling products. We have all the first-hand information, so whatever I say goes.”

“Haven’t we always done it this way? Isn’t this what we do in this industry? I’ve told you before that this is what the audience loves to see. We decided this from the very beginning. Since you wanted to lift him up so high, you should have known how hard he would fall.”

Shen Yi-ran was silent for a moment, and a sudden sense of frustration surged in his heart. But he didn’t say anything. After a long while, he tapped the table and said to Chen Zheng-xi, “Give me a cigarette.”

Chen Zheng-xi handed him a cigarette and then lowered his stance to light it for him. “Okay, I’ll give you half a month off. Didn’t your dad just get discharged from the hospital? You should take him out to relax.”

Shen Yi-ran didn’t say anything. The white smoke slowly blurred his features. He didn’t change his posture until the cigarette burned down to the end. Chen Zheng-xi clicked on the first account that posted. The data was great. The views were continuously increasing with no signs of slowing down. He stared at Yan Liao’s face on the video thumbnail with a cold gaze and smiled silently.

Creation and destruction, beauty and eternal damnation placed side by side could always trigger endless imagination.

They were intricately woven together into the most shocking and eye-catching topic, naturally fabricated into a story that fueled maliciousness.

There were no transitions, only results. People quickly accepted and firmly believed them. The talented and unique artist was actually a person with a bad personality and a messy private life.

The rumors stirred up a storm in the virtual world. Although Yan Liao tried his best to pretend that everything was normal, it was still difficult to cope with such a sudden change. His life seemed to have become unrecognizable overnight, so unfamiliar that it was as if he was only seeing it for the first time.

The dense maliciousness was like a grayish-green vine that was about to completely engulf him, treating him as a host who had failed a mission.

His original audience was a group of cynical, emotional, and sensitive young people. After discovering his so-called true face, they were all angry as if they had been deceived. This anger also spread quickly, like a fuse soaked in gasoline.

From the day it happened, every call Yan Liao made to Shen Yi-ran went unanswered. The heavy snow blocked the roads, and even the subway stopped running. Tang Shaocheng said they had most likely gone into hiding and told Yan Liao to wait, saying he would find a way to get to them.

Finally, on a sunny day with the snow still not melted, Yan Liao, without telling Tang Shaocheng, went to the studio by himself, but he only saw the assistant there.

“Brother Shen and Mr. Chen are on a business trip. He said for you not to worry and that they’ll figure things out when they get back.”

The assistant looked at him with a look of accustomed pity. “It’s going to snow heavily again in the next few days, so don’t come back… If you ask me, just pretend those things never happened. No one will remember forever. Just move on.”

I will remember forever.

If the road ahead is a cliff, should I still move forward?

The wind in the hallway brazenly blew in. Yan Liao’s face felt a sudden, subtle tearing sensation from the wind, like he had been lightly slapped.

He left without saying anything. The pitiful eyes behind him watched him until the elevator doors slowly closed.

Tang Shaocheng left work two hours early. He unlocked the door and saw that the living room was empty. He immediately called Yan Liao.

The ringing tone hit his eardrums one after another. On a winter night, it got dark very early. At five o’clock, there was a continuous expanse of orange light outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the busy tone on his phone seemed even more endless than the farthest light.

“Where are you?”

Yan Liao sat in a cafe, looking at the big, feathery snowflakes outside. A thick layer of snow had accumulated on the benches on the side of the road, making them look like vanilla cakes.

“I just wanted to go out for a walk.”

Tang Shaocheng picked up his coat. “Send me your location. I’m coming to find you now.”

“…Why are you so nervous? I’ll wait for you here. Do you want to go see a movie tonight?”

Tang Shaocheng cooperated perfectly, switching to a relaxed tone as if nothing had happened, and they were just having a casual chat. “Okay, we’ll go see a movie.”

The two of them watched a two-hour foreign movie in a late-night theater. It was already past midnight when they came out. The road conditions were like suddenly unblocked blood vessels; there were no traffic jams all the way home.

After they got home, Tang Shaocheng spoke in a soft and gentle voice. “Don’t go online for a few days, okay? Rest for a while. I’ll take care of these things.”

Yan Liao slowly hummed in agreement. He took off his thick coat and went straight to the bathroom to take a shower. The sound of water was intermittent through the blurred glass. Tang Shaocheng was still standing in the living room, a hint of fatigue hidden in his eyes, like wet clothes that hadn’t had time to dry were forced to be worn, and there was a lingering, heavy dampness on his skin.

By the time they were both showered and in bed, it was already late at night. The room was pitch black after the lights were turned off. Neither of them said good night first.

Yan Liao turned over, buried his face in the soft pillow, and then propped himself up again, his eyes slightly red and swollen. He straddled Tang Shaocheng’s body and leaned down to kiss his face, but his wrist was held as his fingers slid under the other’s clothes.

“…You don’t want to?”

Yan Liao lowered his head, his black bangs covering his expression. After a long while, he asked in a muffled voice, “Why not?”

He looked at Tang Shaocheng with a pair of red, swollen eyes, calm and pitiful. “Do you think I’m like what they say? Do you hate me, too?”

Tang Shaocheng sighed. After a moment of silence, he patiently stroked Yan Liao’s hair and pulled him into his arms.

“Of course not. They don’t know you or understand you at all. Those comments are just for a person they’ve imagined.” He lowered his eyes, his lips brushing against Yan Liao’s slightly sweaty forehead. “None of this is your fault.”

The two of them had known each other since they were teenagers. He had watched Yan Liao grow up. When the usually confident and cheerful kid suddenly showed such a cautious expression, his heart felt like it had been stabbed several times with a rusty, blunt knife.

Tang Shaocheng stroked his hair and said softly, “You’ve been through a lot.”

Yan Liao shrank into his chest and didn’t say anything. “You’ve been through a lot” was not “it’s okay.” He thought, “What have I been through? I’m just listening to what other people are saying.”

After his reputation completely reversed, the people who once said they liked him were now kicking him while he was down. His social media accounts were filled with a large number of abusive private messages every day. Some were from avatars that Yan Liao found familiar. He scrolled up through the chat history and saw that half a month ago, some of them had left messages saying, “I like you so much,” followed by several exaggerated exclamation points. It was as if that “I like you so much” had been shouted out.

Yan Liao pressed the lock button and looked at his expressionless face in the black screen. He suddenly remembered a question he had asked Tang Shaocheng on New Year’s Eve one year. “If I turned into a mosquito, would you still love me?” a very childish question. In reality, sometimes when he saw these people say, “I like you so much,” he would also want to ask a similarly childish question: “Would you still say that no matter what I became?”

Now, he didn’t need an answer. He understood that human emotions were so fragile. Even without any changes, a person who said they liked you could suddenly not like you anymore.

Yan Liao had no interest in words. When he saw long and complicated sentences, he would suspect that he had a reading disability. He would get a headache when he saw more than ten words. He never memorized that thick book of general principles for the college entrance exam. But as long as it was a letter he received, he would read every single word. Those letters were now piled up in a corner of the study, emitting a sense of precarity.

Yan Liao stared into the distance in a daze, unable to articulate how he felt. It was like holding a plum candy in his mouth. At first, he could carelessly taste only the sweetness, but eventually, his tongue would touch the sourness that would make his gums clench, and his features would all twitch and curl up.

He remembered that about half a year ago, he posted his first video on his social media account and couldn’t help but watch it many times, but the view count was still in the single digits.

It took Yan Liao a long time to figure out that no matter how many times an account watched a video, it would only be counted as one view.

Shen Yi-ran had one account, he had one account, Tang Shaocheng had one account, and his parents had two accounts. So, the view count for that video was five.

He thought he wouldn’t care. He thought he would be like skin coated in wax, with no pores for anything to enter, but he remembered that number five in the bottom right corner of the video for a very long time.

He told himself that it didn’t matter if those things were true or false, and that even if he deserved it, it was fine. But just as he remembered the number five so clearly, he remembered every single sentence he had seen. He remembered everything.

After the incident fermented for half a month, it finally reached the people around him. That morning, just as Yan Liao was getting sleepy, he was woken up by his phone ringing. His mom, who usually loved to sleep in, was now calling him at six in the morning with a hoarse voice, asking, “Tell me, what’s going on?”

Yan Liao was too sleepy to think of what to say. He just heard his mom’s hoarse voice on the other end say, “You’re not at all like what they’re saying!”

“You were so good when you were little, so quiet, so obedient. All the uncles, aunts, and neighbors loved you. When you were three, I was pushing you in a stroller at the mall, and two girls followed me all the way, wanting to take a photo of you, saying you were the most beautiful child they had ever seen.”

At this point, his mom started to cry. The sound of her crying deepened as if she were digging a well. Yan Liao found those adjectives comically out of place. “So good, so quiet, so obedient.” He never thought he would hear his mom say these things. Before, she always said, “So mischievous, so disobedient, so awful”—in that case, everything made sense.

His mom was still explaining tirelessly, as if saying these words over and over again would make them spread everywhere like dandelions in the air.

“You haven’t hurt anyone, so you haven’t done anything wrong.”

“You and Little Tang are just good friends. You were classmates in middle school. You were only teenagers back then. How can they say things like that? They don’t understand anything.”

A sharp train whistle seemed to sound in his ears. Yan Liao held the phone further away. His voice sounded calm, almost indifferent. “Just pretend that what they’re saying is all true.”

He hung up the phone.

During that time, Yan Liao had nightmares almost every night.

In his dreams, there was a dark, damp cave. A giant, hideous bat flew out of the dark entrance. He stood there motionlessly, letting the putrid smell engulf his nose and mouth. He couldn’t breathe. His throat felt like it was blocked by something, perhaps a mouthful of hot blood.

In his dream, Chen Zheng-xi’s face appeared in his vision without warning, getting closer and closer as if there were a magnifying glass between them. He realized that the person standing under the magnifying glass was himself, and every word and action was openly taken out and discussed for its motive.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why did you say that? What were you thinking? What was your intention?”

“So this is the kind of person you are.”

…

“So this is the kind of person I am.

The frequent nightmares made him resistant to sleep. He would often get out of bed in the middle of the night and go to the balcony in a daze. The moonlight was as thin as a cicada’s wing. His chest felt as cold as a glass window that had been shattered and was being blown through by the wind. If dreams were a person’s subconscious, then his subconscious was a prohibition on breathing.

From the balcony, he could see a primary school in the distance. When he was home all the time, he could hear the school’s broadcast from morning to night, the bells for classes starting and ending, eye exercises, and calisthenics. He could hear all of it. On the outer wall of the school’s fence, the words, “I am born with a purpose,” were written in a flowing script.

Yan Liao squinted and stared at the line of words for a while, feeling that it was very familiar. He suddenly remembered that this was the slogan posted on the back wall of the art studio during his high school art training.

His memories were like beads with a broken string, rolling back to his high school days. At that time, he and his deskmate sat in the back row. He was right under the first two characters. The characters were only held up by a single nail at the top. So, Yan Liao cleverly took off the radical of the character “cai” (材), which means “talent,” and swapped the positions of the characters “sheng” (生), which means “born,” and “cai” (材). He sat righteously under the words “tian cai” (天才), which means “genius,” and he could see it as soon as he entered the classroom.

It was all a long time ago. Yan Liao thought of the art studio and naturally recalled the days he spent there.

Yan Liao’s spot in the art studio during training was directly facing the road. After dark, the streetlights would slowly turn on. At that time, whenever he saw the streetlights light up one by one, he would feel a little lonely. Not him, but the streetlights. They could only stand in place and couldn’t move, maintaining a posture as if they were bending over or holding something out with both hands, as if they were fixed in place.

His deskmate in the art studio at that time was an uneducated rich kid who was generous and spendthrift. Every day, he would blatantly carry two phones into the classroom, ignoring the “no electronic devices” sign at the door. One of them was a backup in case a teacher confiscated it. He came to take the art exam because he didn’t want to study academics, but he wasn’t even interested in drawing. The teachers ruthlessly confiscated his phones and tablets one after another, like a diving competition.

For a while, the teacher was even frustrated, doubting that he was doing the great profession of having students all over the world and was instead just a used electronics reseller after getting his teaching certificate. It felt like he could pick up a phone and read an ad at any time.

Yan Liao didn’t have many impressions of that person. It was just that one time, the art studio was empty, and everyone else had left, leaving only the two of them. When Yan Liao was putting away his sketch paper, his deskmate woke up. He rubbed his sleepy eyes and looked out the window in a daze. He suddenly said to no one in particular, with no context, “Those streetlights look so lonely.”

He didn’t know if a person could change their impression of another person in an instant, but he remembered that sentence for many years. But in the end, that person didn’t last until the end of the training. He probably repeated a year or went abroad; he couldn’t remember.

Yan Liao loved to draw. Half of his teenage years, from sixteen to eighteen, were spent in the art studio. At that time, his teacher said poetically that these teenagers were like pomegranates that had just been cut open.

That teacher was a good person. Yan Liao remembered that when the teacher saw his drawings, his eyes would suddenly light up. The teacher also earnestly told him that he was too proud and would have to learn to willingly accept a failure sooner or later. At that time, Yan Liao scoffed and thought that he would never admit that any experience was a “failure.” He believed that no matter what age he was, he would not live on the path of correcting mistakes.

When he couldn’t sleep, he would think about many things, as if he had replayed the first half of his life. Yan Liao looked at his reflection in the window, seeing himself like an unsold tropical fruit, giving up on himself and rotting away.

The night had completely darkened. He could faintly see a cloudy, gray mist floating in the sky. If he could reach through the clouds, he could pull out a whole moon.

Usually, not long after Yan Liao woke up, Tang Shaocheng would also wake up. He would grab a sweater or a jacket and bring two cups of hot water to sit on the balcony with him in a daze. Outside the window was still the community square, with a slide, a seesaw, and a swing set for children. In the dead of night, they stood there as if abandoned.

Sometimes, the two of them would sit on the balcony until the night awakened. The soft dawn would flow in like clear water. After dawn, people walking their dogs would start to appear in the small square downstairs. It was when Tang Shaocheng saw the first puppy running onto the lawn that he thought of this. He said to Yan Liao in a slightly hoarse voice, “Let’s get a dog.”

Yan Liao turned his head and saw a layer of tired gray under Tang Shaocheng’s eyes. The words of refusal went around in his head and turned into, “Okay.”

The world outside was a puddle of stagnant water, a murky eyeball. He slowly stopped going online, and his phone was off from morning to night, cutting off contact with the outside world.

Tang Shaocheng installed a monitor in the house and brought back a one-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever, who was a newly-appointed therapy dog, in the evening at the end of March. The dog seemed to be able to sense the low spirits in the air and was always ready to sprint and ram its head into the human’s side.

During that long period of isolation, he only lived with Tang Shaocheng and the puppy. It was as if a blizzard had led to the end of the world, and they were surviving in Noah’s Ark.