Nian Nian [Rebirth] - Chapter 2

The first time Fang Zhizhu showed up at Zhou Haizhen’s doorstep was also on a stiflingly hot evening.

Zhou Haizhen told her to come in and have a cup of tea. Fang Zhizhu removed her mask and smiled, asking him if she could have an ice cream.

Fang Zhizhu was truly beautiful. When her eyes curved into a smile, they made the scenery behind her look like a film set.

Zhou Haizhen led her inside and gave her ice cream. Fang Zhizhu unwrapped it and ate it bit by bit, sitting on the chair in the center of the consultation room in a very relaxed posture.

Typically, such patients are difficult to handle.

Especially a popular celebrity.

Zhou Haizhen was prepared for a challenge, but Fang Zhizhu did not make things difficult for him at all.

She calmly described her condition, recounted the general status of her previous treatments, and then said to Zhou Haizhen, “I need a place to rest.”

Zhou Haizhen understood.

For a long time afterward, Fang Zhizhu would come to his place to rest.

Fang Zhizhu did not like to talk about specifics or her feelings. Most of the time, she only spoke about the scenes she had seen: the first blossoming tree in the spring field, a painting a fan had given her, the stage lights being too dazzling, causing the audience beneath the stage to appear as a dense, dark mass.

Her visiting times were inconsistent, but she always booked in advance—sometimes a week ahead, sometimes only ten minutes.

If Zhou Haizhen wasn’t home, she would sit alone for a while. Zhou Haizhen would ask his wife to help get her favorite snacks. Fang Zhizhu had no celebrity airs and clearly did not require overly specialized medical attention. She would eat snacks and chat with his wife, and still pay the consultation fee when she left.

Her emotions gradually began to show only after three or four years of knowing her.

Fang Zhizhu’s life underwent some changes. She started talking more to Zhou Haizhen, often smiling, but she would also suddenly zone out.

She would space out for five or six minutes, her gaze lowered to the beads on her hand. The beads were decorations on her clothing. Fang Zhizhu’s slender fingers would flick them one by one, then flick them back one by one.

Zhou Haizhen asked her, “What were you just thinking about?”

Fang Zhizhu replied, “I feel very happy.”

Zhou Haizhen smiled: “Just happy?”

Fang Zhizhu tilted her head: “Perhaps happy, or blessed.”

Zhou Haizhen knew she had found a wonderful lover. He asked Fang Zhizhu, “Do you still feel tired now?”

Fang Zhizhu admitted, “Yes, otherwise I wouldn’t be coming here.”

Zhou Haizhen asked if she wanted to try hypnosis. Fang Zhizhu refused, saying, “I don’t believe in it. If I don’t believe in it, I can’t be hypnotized.”

What she said was reasonable, but Zhou Haizhen did not write “doesn’t believe in hypnosis” in his medical log. He wrote: “Fear of hypnosis.”

Later, there was an occasion when Zhou Haizhen was running an errand outside, and Fang Zhizhu arrived at the consultation room first.

She must have been too exhausted from work. When Zhou Haizhen returned to the consultation room, he saw her asleep on the sofa.

Zhou Haizhen didn’t go in. He quietly watched Fang Zhizhu through the glass door of the consultation room.

Fang Zhizhu didn’t sleep for long. She woke herself up with a start, inhaling deeply as if she had been suffocating for a long time. Her chest was still heaving violently when she opened her eyes.

Zhou Haizhen pushed the door open and handed her a cup of warm water.

Fang Zhizhu said, “A red house.”

Zhou Haizhen asked, “What kind of red house?”

Fang Zhizhu: “A red house built of bricks, with a pointed roof, and a small star on the top.”

“Anything else?”

“A wall, covered in creeping vines (creeper).”

“How did the creeper look?”

“It covered a large area. It was fully grown in summer and bare in winter.”

“Where were you?”

Fang Zhizhu laughed. She took a sip of water, then looked up at Zhou Haizhen and said, “Dr. Zhou, you’re trying to trick me again.”

Zhou Haizhen: “This is my job. I took your money; I have to do something to help you.”

“I was inside the wall,” Fang Zhizhu said. “This is where I lived when I was little. I dream about it often.”

Zhou Haizhen: “Are the dreams very frequent lately?”

Fang Zhizhu: “Yes, a little frequent recently.”

Later, Fang Zhizhu told Zhou Haizhen many more of her dreams. Zhou Haizhen recorded them one by one, but he wasn’t in a hurry to take any aggressive action. Psychological treatment is like that—many times you have to follow the patient’s pace, and often, treatment is not very effective.

Fang Zhizhu’s career developed successfully. Zhou Haizhen often saw her advertisements and would go to the cinema to watch her films.

Later, Fang Zhizhu didn’t visit the consultation room for a long time. Zhou Haizhen received a notification from the police, asking him to assist with an investigation.

The day he left the police station, Zhou Haizhen closed all the windows and stayed in the dark consultation room by himself, thinking for a long time.

Like Chen Nian, he felt he bore a great responsibility for Fang Zhizhu’s death. Chen Nian was ignorant, but he knew, and yet he did nothing.

Chen Nian came to him repeatedly. Every time Zhou Haizhen saw Chen Nian’s face, he had to go see his own psychological supervisor afterward.

Now, ten years after Fang Zhizhu’s departure, he finally decided to retire himself. Facing Chen Nian again, he felt a little lighter in his heart.

He talked a lot with Chen Nian. Even he was surprised that, in this conversation, he didn’t stand from a psychologist’s perspective but genuinely treated the two of them as friends.

Chen Nian’s emotions were stable, except for the trembling when she first entered the door.

When she sat on the sofa where Fang Zhizhu used to sit, she completely calmed down. The way she occasionally smiled bore an uncanny resemblance to the Fang Zhizhu in Zhou Haizhen’s memory.

Apart from her leaving, Fang Zhizhu mostly brought happiness to those around her, rarely pain.

So, when they talked about Fang Zhizhu, their expressions weren’t painful when they finally parted ways.

Chen Nian returned home late at night.

It started thundering on the way, and as soon as she pushed open the door to her house, the heavy rain poured down, turning the world outside the floor-to-ceiling windows into a white blur.

There was a photo of Fang Zhizhu in the hallway. The decor of this room had never changed; it was exactly as it was when Fang Zhizhu left.

Chen Nian opened her backpack, pulled out the notebook where she had taken notes, and went to the study.

She began searching for information revealed in Fang Zhizhu’s dreams.

That was another world, a world Fang Zhizhu had been unwilling to open up to Chen Nian.

A red house built of bricks, a pointed roof, and a small star on the top.

A wall covered in creeper, and a city with distinct seasons.

A small Fang Zhizhu, inside the wall, constantly looking outside, with peeling green paint on the window frame.

The computer light reflected on Chen Nian’s face, from darkness until dawn.

The interior lights became irrelevant. Outside, the sun was high in the sky, and the heat was scorching.

Chen Nian emerged from the study, pushed open the balcony door, and stood in the sunlight.

They had a very large balcony, once paved with a cobblestone path and filled with flowers.

Now it was the height of summer, but there was nothing there. Chen Nian walked barefoot to the spot where Fang Zhizhu had jumped and looked down.

The city was noisy, full of traffic, but Chen Nian only saw the red house, with a pointed roof and a small star on top of the point.

She suddenly began to laugh. She found it hilarious how fate had arranged things for the two of them to end up like this.

The red house wasn’t as distant as the dream suggested. It was on the outskirts of the city where Chen Nian grew up, an orphanage converted from an abandoned school.

But it had long been demolished. It stood in Fang Zhizhu’s dream, at the furthest extent of time’s backward flow. Chen Nian could no longer see the girl she loved inside it.

Chen Nian closed her eyes, feeling a wave of dizziness.

When she opened her eyes again, the oppressive heat that enveloped her body was gone. A cold wind blew across her face.

Chen Nian strained to make out her surroundings and confirmed she was in a children’s Chinese language class.

Another gust of cold wind blew in, and the small boy sitting by the window sneezed. The teacher on the podium, speaking Mandarin with a heavy local accent, shouted at him, “Wang Xiaoming, close that window!”

Wang Xiaoming sniffled and mumbled, “Teacher, I’m hot.”

The teacher stepped down from the podium to feel Wang Xiaoming’s forehead. Many students stood up, their heads craned like swallows to watch the commotion.

Chen Nian also stood up. She saw her small hands and small feet, and the soft pigtails that brushed against her cheeks.

Chen Nian frowned. She grabbed her deskmate’s arm and heard her own childish voice when she spoke: “What is my name?”

Her deskmate widened her eyes, confused and slightly dull, and answered her, “Chen Nian.”

Chen Nian: “What grade are we in?”

Deskmate: “Second Grade, Class Three.”

Chen Nian: “…”

Her deskmate started reciting: “My school is Beisi Primary School, and my home address is Anliang City…”

Chen Nian pulled back her chair and bolted out the door.

Wang Xiaoming had a fever, and the teacher hadn’t yet had time to deal with the situation when she heard the collective shouts in the classroom.

“Chen Nian is running away!”

“Teacher, Chen Nian is running away!!!”

The teacher looked back and only saw the silhouette of Chen Nian rushing out of the classroom.

“Ah, Chen Nian, why are you running!” “Class monitor, chase her! Class monitor, don’t chase, class monitor, go get Teacher Li from the next classroom!” “Wang Xiaoming, come with me to the school clinic. Ah, Class Monitor, let Teacher Li take Wang Xiaoming to the clinic!” “Chen Nian, why are you running—!”

The quiet campus instantly erupted in noise.

The Chinese teacher rushed out of the classroom, stumbled on the stairs, and nearly fell.

By the time she reached outside the teaching building, Chen Nian was already halfway across the central courtyard, far ahead of her. She could only point and shout at the dean of students who had just emerged from the office: “Chase her! Chase her! A student ran off!!!”

So, a group of people trailed far behind Chen Nian, but no one could figure out how a child who only reached the waist of an adult could run so fast.

Her two legs spun like wheels of fire. Her target was clear, her momentum fierce, rushing straight outside without a single glance back.

She dodged the people who tried to stop her, dashed to the school gate, and squeezed right through the gap in the door.

The noisy old world arrived before her.

This memory was etched into her mind without needing deliberate recollection.

The perpetually dusty streets, the low stationery shops, and the snack rickshaws tightly clustered outside the school gate.

Chen Nian had no time for nostalgia, no time to think. Her legs did not stop, as if the energy she had suppressed for ten years could finally be fully unleashed.

She cut through the small road on the west side and reached North Street. If she just kept running and running along North Street, she could reach the orphanage and see the red house.

Her heart pounded violently in her chest. The cold wind scraped her face like knives.

Running was not a comfortable experience, yet Chen Nian felt joy.

A long-lost, hope-filled joy.

The scenery rushed away completely, and her surroundings grew quieter and quieter.

In 1997, the suburbs of Anliang had large fields of farmland, desolate in winter, covered only by cold mist.

Chen Nian couldn’t run as fast as she started, but she kept going.

She ran at the fastest speed this body and this soul could muster.

She finally saw the red house with the pointed roof. She saw the rusted star on top of the red house.

She stopped running. She circled the star and found the angle from Fang Zhizhu’s dream.

Chen Nian turned around, climbed the pile of bricks, and scaled the wall covered with dead vines.

She didn’t dare to breathe, nor did she dare to blink. She searched desperately through all the scenes.

Finally, she saw Fang Zhizhu.

Tiny Fang Zhizhu, wearing a wrinkled cotton coat, with her long, seaweed-like hair spread around her. She was inside the dilapidated gray building, framed by the peeling green window frame, staring blankly at her with those beautiful eyes.