Memory

Yu Mao blinked in alarm.

The woman had already turned back around and sat upright, leaning against the car seat with her shoulders level and her neck straight, eyes closed as she rested.

Yu Mao looked at her and gradually furrowed her brows; confusion surfaced in her eyes.

Changgeng was unhappy, but she couldn’t figure out why.

She couldn’t stop herself from sensing it, from guessing at it, replaying the earlier moments over and over in her mind. Her thoughts spun at full speed as she analyzed them, like gears grinding so hard they were about to throw sparks.

After a few breaths, she slowly said, as if tossing out a sweet, chewy tangyuan.

“But I forgot my teacher’s name.”

Nan Changgeng’s brows moved. She lifted her eyelids, surprise showing in her eyes.

“You haven’t been in touch for a long time?”

“No. I just don’t usually call her by her name. I only call her Teacher.”

Then the name didn’t seem so important, and she had casually erased it along with the rest, the way one might clear a few kilobytes of cache.

“…Your memory really is terrible.” She gave a faint laugh, clearly surprised, but amusement also rippled through her eyes.

She had seen so much of Yu Mao’s abnormality by now that she no longer reacted with the same shock as she had at the beginning. Instead, she was simply immersed in that hard-to-describe feeling of… some coiled desire slowly loosening and opening again.

Yu Mao shook her head; she did not accept that assessment.

She reached out a claw, hooked the silk handkerchief from the pocket of the woman’s jeans, and laid it flat in her palm. It was stained with water and blood, dirty and mottled.

“On June 15, eleven years ago, you took a photo and posted a handkerchief you’d embroidered yourself on your blog. It was light blue, with an orchid embroidered in the lower right corner and the character lan in pale pink. You said it was a birthday present, for your mother.”

Yu Mao lifted her eyes and met the woman’s expression, where astonishment and daze were mixed together. In a soft voice, she said, “It got dirty, so I washed it and brought it back to you.”

Nan Changgeng could barely contain the confusion in her heart. But in truth, she was letting that confusion cover a deeper, more complicated feeling.

She remembered this matter, but she had no impression at all of the specific date; she had even forgotten the year.

She had embroidered that handkerchief because she knew her mother usually liked embroidery, and also favored things with a touch of classical elegance, so she chose to stitch a handkerchief as a gift. She felt that things bought with money were never something they lacked; sincerity mattered more.

But her mother hadn’t liked that handkerchief very much, and she had never seen her use it or carry it with her.

When it was first given, her mother had been gentle and ordinary, but when she heard that it had been embroidered by her own daughter, her expression changed. Her gaze grew complicated, and for a moment there was dislike in her brows, only to be hidden a moment later as she turned back with a smile to answer her brother.

At the time, she had thought it was an illusion. Her mother had a mild temperament and loved her children; how could she possibly dislike a gift from her daughter?

This little thing, she had almost forgotten completely. Now it had been pulled out of the back of life, dusted off, and examined again, and only then did she faintly sense her mother’s complicated feelings in that instant.

But what exactly her mother had been thinking, Nan Changgeng didn’t know, and didn’t want to dig into anymore.

For years now, she had been trapped in the prison her mother had set with her death, like rolling over iron nails for so long that the pain had gone numb, until it became anger, until it became a state where she no longer allowed herself to hurt.

Compared with those past events, her attention was more concentrated on the present; on the weak, quiet girl beside her.

Her gaze swept over the gauze on Yu Mao’s forehead, where faint traces of blood had seeped through, and fixed there involuntarily. Her thoughts drifted wildly, imagining drilling through that wound into Yu Mao’s memory, to see exactly how much of herself was stored in that brain that seemed to clear its cache so often.

“Remember it that clearly? What else do you remember?” Her tone was deliberately casual and curious, but she still couldn’t quite manage to lift an eyebrow. Her right hand rested at the joint of her left arm, fingers unconsciously clenching, pressing wrinkles into the sweater.

As if all the strength controlling her body were flowing inward; gathering like water, tightening her heart.

Yu Mao blinked. Her memory reservoir held too much; for a moment she didn’t know where to begin. After thinking for a while, she decided to pick out some things Nan Changgeng might find interesting.

“I remember that on July 3 of L770, at eight-thirty in the evening, you were sick but still went onstage for a performance. After it ended at ten, you were getting ready to leave. When you got into the car, your foot caught in your skirt and you fell inside. Even while you were lying on the car seat, you still turned back and smiled, waving to the fans and saying you were fine. Your whole face was red from the fever, and everyone said they couldn’t tell whether you were blushing.”

Nan Changgeng lowered her head slightly and pressed the bridge of her nose with her knuckles for a long while before looking up at her with a strange expression. “You were there at the time?”

She had a vague impression of this incident. She had been feverish and dazed, with no time to care about embarrassment; she had done everything on instinct. The reason she could still remember it after so many years was only because it had been the first time she had performed while burning with a high fever, so it had left a deep impression.

But in L770, she was twenty-three years old, and Yu Mao… was eleven. At such a young age, she was already following idols in person?

Yet Yu Mao shook her head, and what she said only made Nan Changgeng even more astonished than if she had been there herself.

“No. I watched the videos fans took.” As soon as she started recalling it, she couldn’t help but say more, as if the scene were still vivid before her eyes. “You were wearing a white dress that reached your ankles, your hair was long enough to brush your shoulder blades, and you were smiling toward the camera. Your eyes were shining with moisture, and you were blinking a little too often, maybe because you didn’t feel very well. Very beautiful, but also very pitiful.

“After you sat up straight, you waved to everyone outside the car window and told them to go home early. You were speaking a little unclearly; some people were so worried they were crying, shouting and sobbing. It seemed like you couldn’t receive the information from outside anymore. You just kept smiling; it was very split between inside and outside the car, like being in two different worlds.

“Those I really don’t know… I don’t have any impression of them.”

It was the first time she had heard Yu Mao speak so much at once, and she was talking about her own old “black history” at that. Nan Changgeng found the image Yu Mao described a little amusing, but she was also startled by the clarity of her memory.

“Just from seeing a video, you can remember it for so long? Or do you often go back and rewatch old videos?”

“No need to rewatch. I’ve kept it all in my brain, and there’s a lot, a lot more.”

Yu Mao withdrew from the memory and her gaze focused again on the woman before her. The image flickered and blurred for an instant; the two figures overlapped, the present covering the past.

Her features were more mature than before, her bearing and temperament having shed their youthful green, restrained and self-possessed, with her sharpness kept tightly in check. Her smile was also more controlled, and the somewhat mechanical but brilliant toothy grin of the past was rarely seen now.

Nan Changgeng looked back at her as well, her gaze deep and dark, eyelashes casting a layer of shadow, as if falling from a gray-blue sea into an abyss, slowly swallowing her whole.

She gave no response to Yu Mao’s answer. Or rather, that was her response.

With one arm folded across herself, her posture carried a hint of self-restraint and wariness. Her pale skin glowed faintly under the bleak light; dressed in a soft sweater, she still always looked cold. Like a little planet drifting alone in the universe, or a soul detached from its body.

Lonely and deserted; desolate to the bones, gloomy and deep.

Yu Mao thought of that line of poetry and, for a moment, couldn’t work out what hidden meaning lay behind that look.

The handkerchief in her hand was damp and cool, seeping through her pores into her bloodstream and driving straight to her heart, where it burst open into a spray of ice.

Painful. Cold.

What was Changgeng thinking? Why was she tense, and why was she keeping herself so far away?

“On March 28 of L771, the first day of school, Monday, I skipped class to go to your concert. During the break between songs, you said that a cello solo is always lonely, but because of us, those pieces were like moonlight shining on the sea, dotting the quiet night with shimmering light. If a solo piece was a ship lost at sea, then we were the lighthouse guiding it home, lighting up an endpoint in the boundless distance forever.

“When you said that, the sunlight was blinding and brilliant. There was a little moisture in your eyes, your irises were so blue, bright as if someone had scattered a handful of silver stars into them.”

Do you still remember? Can you still retrieve the happy, at ease version of yourself from back then?

Later, the pieces were no longer solo pieces, but the ships still lost themselves in the endless sea and sky of fog, seeing the lit lighthouse as the eye of a beast.

Nan Changgeng closed her eyes.

The girl’s dark, glossy eyes, faintly wet with tears, were like a mirror, reflecting the burning heat in her own eyes. Memory was like pulling up a fine thread, dragging out the embarrassment hidden at the bottom of her heart.

“I don’t remember.”

Her voice was low and restrained, like a melody drifting up from the deep sea, mixed with murky salt water; before it could break the surface, it sank heavily back down.

The beauty of that time had already become too distant from her, and the foundations beneath it had been shaken, unable to support the sudden collapse that came later, and unable to sprout again from the ruins.

Ever since she had understood the meaning behind the suicide note her mother left behind, she had no longer forced herself or tormented herself. But she would remain lost forever.

An illusion; her life had suddenly seemed to become a fictional illusion. She had walked a very long way, reaching out and yearning to touch a pane of glass, but whenever she moved her hand, there was only a vast white fog.

If she looked back, she still couldn’t make out the road she had come from.

The first half of her life had been a process of building and collapsing a castle in the air, a dream of self-deception.

The more Yu Mao talked, the more memories she revealed; the clearer they became, and the more Nan Changgeng’s eyes stripped away that harmless kitten skin from her. Real simplicity and cleanliness should not have been able to store so many things from the past.

The ceiling light was a ghostly white. When she half-opened her eyes, she saw the shadow cast by the girl’s thin body twisting into a dark patch on the floor, condensing into a huge aberration.

But Yu Mao’s voice was very soft, like a wisp of wind brushing over the tender core of a flower.

“It’s okay. I remember.”

“I remember everything about you.”

“April 1 of L773 was your last live performance before you stepped behind the scenes. You wore a navy jacket with white trim, black jeans, and had your hair tied into a high ponytail. After singing one song, you played the bass you’d just learned for the audience below the stage.

“When everyone praised how well you played, the corners of your mouth lifted very slightly. You were secretly pleased, but your playing gestures got even bigger as you moved around the edge of the stage. The sister standing next to me couldn’t help screaming until her voice turned hoarse like a rooster’s, complaining that you were showing off.

“On November 29 of L772, you went to a music festival. It was cold up north, but you only wore a black trench coat onstage, with a cool expression. Fans below shouted for you to put on your down jacket; you pretended not to hear them. A girl in the front row got so angry she took off her own down jacket and threw it onto the stage.

“And then one after another, down jackets were thrown up onto the stage. Everyone, onstage and off, was jumping and howling together with white breath pouring from their mouths, fired up to the point of singing their hearts out. You said only music and companions must not be let down. You said you had received so much love. You said we were your companions.”

Forgotten? All of it forgotten?”}

TL Note:

black history (黑历史) = embarrassing or cringe-worthy past, especially old posts or incidents someone would rather forget.