Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Wedding March

“…Things have really been getting more and more off lately. Even when I get home, I feel like there’s something soft and wet crawling across the floor all night in the dark… No, no, no, I didn’t see anything. It’s just that the floor is especially clean, with water marks—like it’s just been mopped—but when I glanced at the mop by the sink, it was dry…”

“And my roommate—when we were playing ball, the sky turned this very, very dark pink… Not the dark red you sometimes see; I know that’s light scattering, just physics. But the dark pink I saw yesterday… how to put it—it felt like a stomach had swallowed me and my roommate along with the entire court. And later, on my way home, too—like there was an intestine running straight to my place, and I was walking inside it…”

Dr. Cen pushed up his glasses. “Don’t stress. Fluctuations are normal. Didn’t you say you worked late again on Friday? And argued with your boss? Like you said…”

He chuckled. “Who doesn’t go crazy at work?”

“I know, I know. I only freaked out because something set me off again. I can actually tell what’s a hallucination.”

Lin Jianyuan said, “But there’s one thing I really don’t get. I’ve been thinking about it since last night…”

“What?”

“When I got home last night, I found the windows wet. Rain was hitting the glass.”

“Mm. It rained last night—pretty hard.”

“But I was dry.”

“….” The fingers on the keyboard stopped. Dr. Cen turned his head and glanced at him.

Lin Jianyuan lowered his head and looked at his hands. They were callused; otherwise, there was nothing on them.

He muttered, vexed, “If it was pouring like that outside, how could I have walked all the way back and stayed dry? How do you explain that? Unless I really did walk home inside an intestine…”

“You said you live quite far from here, right?”

Withdrawing his gaze, Dr. Cen went back to typing. “City A is big. It can rain here while your area’s still dry. Last night’s rain came on fast—maybe it just happened to start right when you got home?”

“I thought of that, but isn’t that a bit too much of a coincidence? Doctor, am I getting hung up on it?”

Dr. Cen let out a quick laugh and shook his head. “I’ve noticed you’re always very calm. Whether it’s the hallucinations or things you can’t figure out, you analyze them calmly and objectively.”

Lin Jianyuan gave a wry smile. “So I’m lucid in my madness, is that it?”

“Not exactly. Actually, I think you’re doing okay—not a deterioration—because from start to finish you can tell hallucination from reality. That’s really not easy. Look, even though you always think you have violent tendencies, to this day you haven’t hurt anyone in the real world, right? The only thing you’ve ever laid into is your hallucinations.”

"I'm no hallucination—" squishy thief suddenly wriggled out of Lin Jianyuan's pocket, snapping back in anger.

Squish! Lin Jianyuan absentmindedly flattened it for a bit of on-the-spot stress relief.

"Yes, yes." On a sudden whim, he held the squishy toy up to the doctor. "Dr. Cen, can you see this?"

Dr. Cen’s gaze dropped to his palm. "A snail-shaped squishy toy? First time I've seen one. Apparently anything can be turned into a squishy toy these days."

"So the squishy toy is actually real..." Lin Jianyuan muttered. "So that day in the livestream studio lounge, when I was groping for my phone with my eyes closed and grabbed the squishy toy instead, the cold touch startled me, triggered another acute episode, and that's why I heard the squishy talking to me..."

"@#%$@%!..." The squishy toy thrashed wildly in Lin Jianyuan’s palm.

"Thank you, doctor. I get it now." Lin Jianyuan let out a long breath, hope bright in his eyes. "I feel like there's hope for me yet."

"There always was," Dr. Cen said with a smile.

As the appointment was wrapping up, Dr. Cen suddenly called after him: "I actually think your roommate's a pretty decent guy. You could ask him to play ball more often."

"How did you arrive at that?" Lin Jianyuan was taken aback.

"I think you two could really hit it off. Don't you?" said Dr. Cen.

On the way home, Lin Jianyuan kept turning over the doctor's last question.

He soon concluded that what Dr. Cen really wanted was for him to make more friends.

Come to think of it, he really didn't have many friends in City A... maybe that was one reason he ended up with a mental illness.

If he'd met up with a couple of friends now and then—played some ball, had a few drinks, let off steam in time—would he have avoided sinking to this point?

Since it was doctor's orders, Lin Jianyuan decided not to be shy about it.

The moment he got home he said to his roommate, "You free next Saturday? Come to a wedding banquet with me."

Roommate: "?"

Lin Jianyuan had thought he might hesitate, but he answered almost at once: "Sure."

There was a smile in his voice, and it was a nice voice. The tail end lifted a touch, giving it a natural fuckboy lilt.

"Let me think how I ought to present myself..." the roommate drawled, still smiling.

"What do you mean, present yourself?" Lin Jianyuan said, half laughing, half exasperated. "You planning to dress to the nines and wow the whole room? Don't make a production of it—you don't know them. Honestly, I don't know most of them either. Just throw on whatever; we just need to bring our mouths and eat, eat, eat. I'm mainly asking you to help me get my money's worth—otherwise all that cash in the red envelope is such a loss."

Lin Jianyuan realized his roommate's wiring was, in fact, pretty odd. Who thinks about peacocking at a stranger's wedding?

This roommate of his...

So vain!

Workdays always blurred past in a busy haze, and in a blink another week was gone.

Looking back, there was always this hollow sense of having done nothing.

I really want to go out and have some fun.

Saturday evening, Lin Jianyuan grabbed a random outfit and stepped out of his room.

He'd had no interest in whatever fancy getup his roommate might contrive—no matter what he wore, in Lin Jianyuan's eyes he was just a lump of offal running around naked.

Yet when the roommate appeared before him, Lin Jianyuan froze.

The digestive system was still a digestive system: a slender, long throat; the stomach, pancreas, liver, gallbladder; and below, a great looping platter of intestines.

The pink digestive system was still pink and tender as ever; the only difference was that today his whole body was wrapped in a soft halo. Like a shaft of angel light pouring down on his head.

Did I wake up too fast? Why is the offal glowing.

Suspicious, Lin Jianyuan tugged him over, away from the beam of sunset spilling through the window.

“What’s up?” his roommate asked with a grin.

Even without the sunset’s soft-focus filter, the roommate was still faintly glowing.

The whole digestive tract shimmered with a gentle light, looking particularly... fresh.

Lin Jianyuan looked him up and down, puzzled, and suddenly his heart fluttered.

Good grief—was he so handsome he was literally glowing?!

He couldn’t help wondering: just how handsome did you have to be to make even a straight guy like him think you were glowing?

At once he pictured a fair-skinned, gorgeous, long-legged hunk in a suit.

Black suit or white? Either would look good. There ought to be a tiny ponytail at the back of his head too—it’d make him look even more preening, more of a scumbag.

As for the fair skin and pretty face—that was Lin Jianyuan’s bias. He always felt there was a damp, clammy chill to his roommate. The guy didn’t exactly seem like the sunny, hearty type.

More than a bright-eyed undergrad, he was like the clammy male ghost of a grad student doomed never to graduate.

Lin Jianyuan: “Head out?”

His roommate smiled. “Let’s go.”

The wedding was at a well-known five-star hotel in City A. At the entrance, a giant portrait of the bride and groom was wreathed in fresh flowers, and a sign pointed the way to Such-and-such Banquet Hall, emblazoned: “Hao Menghai & Lu Xiangxiang — Wishing You a Hundred Years of Harmony.”

The whole venue was decked out, grand yet romantic.

If this had been five years ago, fresh out of college, Lin Jianyuan figured he’d have felt self-conscious showing up in a T-shirt and casual pants.

But five years into the grind, wage-slave Lin Jianyuan had only one thought: a hotel this nice meant the food shouldn’t be bad.

Bringing his roommate along was so worth it.

Guests took their seats one after another, but the hot dishes were slow to appear.

He asked and learned the ceremony wouldn’t officially start until 18:18.

“If I’d known, I’d have brought Little Thief...” Lin Jianyuan sighed.

At long last, when the program wrapped up close to seven, the hot dishes finally started coming out. The bride and groom began making the rounds to toast each table.

Lin Jianyuan wasn’t close to the groom, and of course even less so to the bride. He wasn’t even familiar with the full set of raw offal beside him, hahaha.

The only thing he knew well was the 888 cash gift he handed over at the door.

Prices were high in City A; cash gifts usually started at over 800.

With that 888 gone, he didn’t have much left for the month.

He’d have to eat his money’s worth.

Sure enough, the dishes from the five-star hotel’s chef were outstanding.

The key was, the spread was heavy-hitting—sea cucumber, giant lobster—one platter after another. A few extra bites of seafood and he’d make his money back with ease.

As Lin Jianyuan was tucking in, a lot of big pink bubbles suddenly rose through the banquet hall.

When the bride made her entrance, bubble machines on both sides of the red carpet had already been churning out soap bubbles. Under the lights, they turned iridescent pink—pure fairytale.

Bubble machines are cheap, easy to run, and the effect is terrific.

Right after graduation, Lin Jianyuan had temped at a wedding-planning company; he knew this routine like the back of his hand.

Those huge transparent soap bubbles, lit by the stage lights into dreamy pink, lent the whole venue a romance verging on unreal.

A faint, pleasant fragrance drifted through the air. Lin Jianyuan tipped his head back to sniff, but for the life of him couldn’t place what it was.

Never mind—he didn’t know perfume to begin with, but this one really did smell good, sweet enough to make you want to fall in love at first sniff.

“Really? So we met back then? What a stroke of fate!”

“Add me on WeChat?”

“Sure, sure... By the way, you got any plans tonight?”

From the next table came the slightly excited chatter of a man and a woman.

Lin Jianyuan didn’t even look over, just kept eating, eating, eating.

“Mmm... mm.”

At a table to the front left, a young couple suddenly clutched each other and fell into a deep, tender kiss.

Their table burst into applause, then joined the fray, couples pairing off to kiss.

Lin Jianyuan ignored it all, head down, still eating, eating, eating.

“...” His roommate suddenly set down his chopsticks.

“What is it?” Lin Jianyuan went on chewing, chewing, chewing, turned his head—and saw a pink bubble the size of a human head drift down into his roommate’s plate.

Lin Jianyuan gave it a casual swat.

Pop!

The pink soap bubble burst, spattering fine droplets.

“There are way too many bubbles. What’s going on?”

At last, something felt off to Lin Jianyuan. He swallowed his mouthful of lobster, frowned, and stood up. “Where’s the staff? Who’s in charge of the bubble machine? Can we turn it off for now—”

Doo-doo-doo-doo~ doo-doo-doo-doo~

Lin Jianyuan froze and looked back in surprise. A bright spotlight had snapped onto the symphony orchestra onstage.

Boom!

A single stroke of the timpani slammed open the Wedding March!