Chapter 76: N. The Dream of the Banana and the Deer

Su Hui’s skin exuded an aroma of green grass and rum, enveloping Ning Yixiao’s body like a mist.

His parted legs pressed against the edge of the sofa, his toes digging into the long-plush carpet, flushed with pink, trembling like an Icelandic ice cream after a rain. The absence of an embrace was unsettling, yet it brought an entirely new sensory experience.

Like the tide outside the window, surging up and then falling. The way Su Hui kissed him made Ning Yixiao think of that cherry stem from many years ago. He had once imagined the entire process of it being knotted, and now it was replicating upon himself, piece by piece.

“Su Hui, are you made of water?”

Ning Yixiao didn’t touch him, keeping his hands to the side, looking as if he were an detached bystander.

Su Hui liked to answer a question with a question. “Did I get you dirty?”

“It’s everywhere.” Ning Yixiao, who had been leaning lazily against the sofa, suddenly leaned forward and gave him a somewhat rough kiss, acting almost as unscrupulously as if he were entering the depths of his throat.

Su Hui’s jumping senses fractured from time to time; at this moment, he suddenly associated this with the way Ning Yixiao looked during meetings, deadpan and serious: wearing glasses, expression cold and earnest, lips moving in a fully English discussion, rigorous and focused, logic clear, his words interspersed with obscure mathematical formulas and neural network models.

A completely different person from now.

Apart from himself, no one had ever seen this brilliant mind manipulated by desire.

Unable to touch him, Ning Yixiao clung to kissing even more than usual, giving Su Hui an immense sense of satisfaction.

They were like two puppets made of maltose; when they kissed, they would melt, intertwining in countless threads, getting stickier the more they kissed, unable to separate no matter what, destined to turn into the same puddle of syrup.

Kissing blurs a person’s reason and awakens the subconscious. Almost out of habit, Ning Yixiao raised his hand, wanting to hold the back of Su Hui’s head when Su Hui dodged backward.

“You can’t foul…”

Su Hui laughed out loud, though his eyes looked a bit dazed and his words were somewhat slurred. “Might as well just tie me up…”

But in the next second, the situation reversed, and he was pressed into the sofa.

“Ning Yixiao, you fouled—”

“So what? You can call for a stop.” Ning Yixiao’s hand brushed over Su Hui’s face, gripping his throat with neither too much nor too little force. “If you want to.”

Su Hui had no strength to resist at all. His eyes were dazed, and in a trance, he thought of the days he was trapped in the psychiatric hospital.

Back then, the books he could access were few and far jewelry, but he urgently needed books. Most of what he could find were related to Christianity, among which was an autobiography of a Christian, describing a miraculous encounter in a dream between a saint and an angel:

[…His golden arrow pierced my heart again and again. When he pulled out the golden arrow, my internal organs seemed to be dragged out along with it, leaving me entirely ignited by the love of God. The pain was so intense that I couldn’t stop groaning, yet this pain was so blissful that I prayed it could last forever…] ①

And that coincidentally happened to be the inspiration for the sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which Su Hui was highly obsessed with.

He had never set foot in the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, nor had he seen that sculpture group with his own eyes, but he had collected many photographic works of it, hidden in the drawer of his bedroom. He remembered every tiny detail in the sculpture vividly, whether it was the slightly parted lips or the curled toes.

At this very moment, his soul was detached, as if he had become a tourist appreciating the sculpture from a third-person perspective. The self in his vision was just like that devout nun, limp and blurred, enveloped by the veil-like golden light of a hallucination.

His language system broke down completely as well; his slurring tongue repeated Ning Yixiao’s name and many “no’s”, but to no avail.

At two o’clock in the morning, Su Hui, who had been carried to the bathroom, gradually recovered in the warm water, like an aquatic plant slowly regaining its vitality.

He leaned back against Ning Yixiao’s chest. The alcohol had completely worn off, leaving him feeling achy and fatigued all over, yet full of vigor.

“Sleepy?” Ning Yixiao lowered his head, using his high nose bridge to nuzzle against Su Hui’s shoulder nook every now and then, kissing him very lightly from time to time, making Su Hui feel very ticklish.

Su Hui shook his head while dodging, letting out a negative monosyllable from his nose, laughing as he smeared foam onto Ning Yixiao’s face. “Do you want to sleep now?”

Ning Yixiao shook his head too, his lips catching his earlobe and quickly releasing it.

Su Hui had no strength left and was ticklish, feeling troubled by his tossing, so he ran to the other end of the bathtub to lean back, resting his feet against Ning Yixiao’s chest.

Ning Yixiao took the cue, lowering his head to kiss the top of his foot smeared with foam.

“Su Hui.”

“Mm?” he responded lazily.

“You are very beautiful.”

Su Hui’s reaction was slightly bashful, looking up at the ceiling. Even though he was frequently praised like this, hearing it from Ning Yixiao still made his heart leap uncontrollably.

“I mean it.”

“…Thank you.”

Ning Yixiao smiled too, rubbing his calves with neither too much nor too little force.

Having kept his head tilted back, Su Hui’s chin suddenly dropped as he looked at Ning Yixiao. “Can we go see the sea?”

Ning Yixiao raised an eyebrow. “Now?”

Su Hui nodded. “I want to go. Do you want to come with me?”

“Come over and kiss me.”

Su Hui immediately leaned over, planted a kiss on Ning Yixiao’s lips, and showed an expectant expression.

Keeping his promise, Ning Yixiao stood up, bringing out a splash of water that felt like a downpour above the bathtub.

“Lie down, I’ll get your clothes.”

Five minutes later, Ning Yixiao holding Su Hui’s hand, walked directly down the white stairs on the side of the terrace to the beach. It was so quiet here that there was only the sound of the sea, the deep blue night sky, the black ocean, the beach illuminated snowy white by the moonlight, and a pair of shadows printed on the sand and pebbles.

“Ning Yixiao.”

“Mm?”

“Do you still hate the sea? Like before.”

Ning Yixiao went quiet for a few seconds. “It seems I don’t hate it that much anymore. Before, whenever I thought of the ocean, it was full of bad memories. Later, when I thought of the sea again, it was no longer those memories that would give me nightmares.”

Su Hui’s hair was whipped up by the sea breeze. He tucked it behind his ear, walking backward while smiling at Ning Yixiao. “Do you think of me?”

Ning Yixiao nodded. “Mm. Sometimes when I sit in the office or in this house, I also look at the sea. Looking at it, I will think of you, imagining that if you were here, you would definitely like this kind of scenery. But sometimes, I also think of my mother. Occasionally, I even see her walking on the beach, wearing a white dress, looking beautiful.”

Su Hui held his hand, simply caressing it gently.

“It must be full of regrets.”

“Mm.” Ning Yixiao felt that his life was entirely composed of regrets. “Actually, I’m very afraid of thinking about her, because I know she won’t appear again. No matter how hard I try, it’s impossible to let her see it, to let her have it too. For a long time, I was very resistant to hearing others mention my parents, because I wished she were here more than anyone.”

As Ning Yixiao spoke, he smiled somewhat bitterly. “She didn’t even get to meet you.”

Su Hui’s eyes grew sore. “Yeah, what a pity.”

“In the end, she left nothing behind except a box of relics. I haven’t even opened it to look at it until now. Just seeing a box that looks similar makes me very anxious.”

This was the first time Ning Yixiao had bared his soul so candidly to Su Hui. Even though six years had passed, he still couldn’t calmly accept his mother’s death.

“But she is free now,” Su Hui said. “Just like she told you, as long as she is scattered into the sea, she will be everywhere. Seeing the sea is like seeing her.”

Ning Yixiao nodded.

They sat by the beach, watching the tides repeatedly strike, sweeping away gravel and seashells.

“Sometimes I feel full of regrets too.” Su Hui held a handful of sand, his voice very light. “Clearly I’m only 26 years old, yet it feels like I’ve lived for a long, long time, losing everything. First it was my dad, then my health, and later more and more, like a mudslide, sweeping everything away.”

Su Hui looked at Ning Yixiao with a smile. “I haven’t told you yet, just a few days before I broke up with you, my uncle committed suicide because of schizophrenia. Before going to the funeral hall, my mom took me to his house, wanting to call my aunt. I went upstairs by myself, only to find that she had left too, leaving only a few lines of words saying she was going to accompany him.”

Even now, Su Hui couldn’t forget the impact of that moment.

“If uncle wasn’t a mental patient, none of this would have happened.”

The silence between the two was brief before Ning Yixiao suddenly spoke, “You projected us into it.”

This was something he didn’t know, and found hard to imagine.

Su Hui didn’t deny it. “It’s hard not to do so, right? My illness has a higher suicide rate, not to mention at that time, I really couldn’t hold on much longer either; even mania couldn’t save me. I tried every possible way, but I couldn’t turn their thoughts around. They insisted on separating me from you no matter what.”

“Actually, what I regret most isn’t the breakup itself, but that I was too vague when I said it.”

Su Hui lowered his head. In the small room of the psychiatric hospital, this most painful scene played out countless times in his mind. “I was afraid that if I said it too clearly and told you everything I experienced during that period, you would firmly choose not to separate. I knew you would definitely be like that, so I could only say there was no reason.”

Ning Yixiao’s hand moved onto Su Hui’s back.

“I know you hate leaving without a reason, and I also know that you might really give up everything to take me away. But I was very afraid of that.” Su Hui’s voice gradually lowered. “I’m sorry, it’s all because of me that we missed six years.”

Ning Yixiao embraced him. “I understand everything. Even if you say nothing, I know.”

Su Hui smiled, parting his hair to show him the scar on his neck that had already healed and lightened. “Look, I went to my grandfather’s ward, grabbed the fruit knife on the nightstand, and pressed it here. As a result, I didn’t even know it cut me. They thought I was crazy and were all afraid of me, but they didn’t intend to listen to me at all.”

Ning Yixiao had long noticed that thin mark, but he never mentioned it, deeply afraid it was a sore point for Su Hui that would make him mind or feel inferior if brought up.

Hearing Su Hui say it himself, Ning Yixiao also breathed a sigh of relief, yet found it even harder to imagine how much pain Su Hui was in back then.

“It’s all in the past.” Ning Yixiao pulled his shoulder closer and kissed the top of his head.

“But those days can never come back,” Su Hui said.

“What can’t come back is what makes it life.”

Hearing this sentence, Su Hui felt an inexplicable resonance and nodded.

“There was a period when I particularly hated them, especially my grandfather, everyone. I thought they all didn’t want me anymore.”

Su Hui survived by relying on his attachment to Ning Yixiao, and gradually lost his anticipation for his family.

“After I got out, I spent a long time saving money. Because of my memory decline, I had forgotten most of their contact information. I could only seek help from any agency I could find. They said they would look into it for me, but in the end, they told me that my grandfather died, my mom had also passed away, and my grandmother was being cared for in a nursing home, but they didn’t know the exact location.”

“And I couldn’t go back.” Su Hui smiled bitterly. “Even if I painted for tourists during the day and worked in restaurants at night, working hard to save enough for a plane ticket, I couldn’t go back, because I am a mental patient and need a guardian’s signature to be allowed.”

How ironic.

Su Hui said with a smile, “I could only strand there, wanting to find you very much too.”

In fact, Su Hui had made many efforts. He once searched online and found Ning Yixiao’s paper. On the last page of the author information, he saw his email, but the sent email seemed to have turned into spam, and Ning Yixiao didn’t see it at all.

“Then how did you find your grandmother?” Ning Yixiao asked softly.

“Professor White helped me find her.” Su Hui lowered his eyes, his eyelashes trembling slightly. “He was attending an academic conference in Canada. Back then, I would take some things I made to sell. In fact, not many people would buy them throughout the day, but he saw them and said he wanted to take me to New York to study art. I thought he was a scammer.”

Su Hui laughed out loud. “But he showed me his works and even took me to that academic conference, letting me sit in the back to listen. He was like a benefactor falling from the sky, pulling me out.”

“I asked him to help find my grandmother. It was truly difficult, literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. But by coincidence, he had a student who had graduated and taken on the reconstruction design work of a nursing home. So that person went to the nursing home every day and would chat with the elderly inside to record their needs.”

Speaking up to here, his eyes lit up. “That day he came to the school, and coincidentally I was there too. He thought I looked familiar. At first, I didn’t pay attention, and he left too. As a result, not long after, he actually turned back and told me that he hadn’t mistaken me—I was the grandson of an elderly person he had seen not long ago, as he had seen the portrait.”

“I couldn’t say a word at that time, just like being in a dream. Professor White immediately took me to that nursing home, in a small town in Chile. I heard that there weren’t many people in the whole town. If it weren’t for that designer, I might never have found my grandmother in my entire life.”

Thinking of the scene of meeting his grandmother, Su Hui couldn’t restrain his tears from falling.

“She was sitting on the bench of the nursing home at that time, holding a palm-sized portrait, staring at it without moving.”

Ning Yixiao wiped his tears for him. “How did she get a portrait?”

“Speaking of which, it’s also quite miraculous.” Su Hui said with a smile, “Among that group of elderly people, one was a portrait artist who used to draw portraits of criminals for the police station. Isn’t that some black humor? My grandmother gestured and communicated, asking him to draw it many, many times, before finally drawing one that looked most like me.”

She held that portrait and showed it to everyone who entered the nursing home, hoping they could find Su Hui.

“Most of the time I’m very unlucky, but at critical moments, I seem to have a bit of luck again.” Su Hui leaned on Ning Yixiao’s shoulder. “Finding you too, it’s all so coincidental, just like it was destined in the dark.”

“Mm.” Ning Yixiao felt emotional in his heart, yet couldn’t help but feel suspicious.

Su Hui was forcibly sent to a psychiatric hospital abroad, and his grandmother’s encounter looked identical; it should all be Xu Zhi’s doing.

“Have you ever looked for Xu Zhi?”

Su Hui was originally playing with Ning Yixiao’s fingers, but hearing this name, his movement stopped.

He shook his head. This name was like a lingering nightmare to him.

“When I fetched grandmother out, she told me that these should all be done by Xu Zhi. So Professor White gave the nursing home a sum of money, asking them to pretend grandmother hadn’t left, and announce her passing after half a year.”

Ning Yixiao naturally understood his intention in doing so. Whether it was the nursing home or that Danni from the psychiatric hospital, they should have all accepted Xu Zhi’s authorization. He placed them so far away just to use distance to create obstacles, making them unable to return even if they wanted to.

But doing so actually posed a difficulty for his own surveillance as well.

“After grandmother came out, she looked for an old acquaintance she knew before, who was the person she was most familiar with and trusted most. But the other party didn’t help, and even said, suggesting we don’t look for anyone else—he could pretend he had never received this phone call, but others might not necessarily do so.”

“Everyone knew who the person truly in power in the Ji family was later. The so-called friends would all turn into enemies.”

Su Hui sighed. “I thought at that time, it was already very good to find grandmother. Even if we depend on each other like this in the future, I would also feel very satisfied, and don’t want to court trouble. So with the help of Professor White, we temporarily settled down in New York like this, living tightly for a year and a half, and later met you.”

“Am I very cowardly?” Su Hui looked toward Ning Yixiao. “What is played in TV dramas is always the deceased young master returning to the country, avenging everyone.”

Ning Yixiao shook his head. “It’s different. Xu Zhi is full of calculations and schemes. You two are one old and one young, with nothing left, and past friends have all turned against you for benefits. What do you have to fight with? Not to mention, he can press you down to death just by using the label of a mental patient, preventing you from turning over. Your choice was very wise.”

Though that was the case, Su Hui still felt himself incompetent.

If he weren’t a mental patient, there might still be room for maneuver. Although he didn’t care about the Ji family’s money and power, falling into another’s hands in such a way—and this person very likely harmed his mother and grandmother—how could Su Hui not hate it.

“Don’t think about it.” Detecting Su Hui’s low mood, Ning Yixiao gave timely comfort, caressing his shoulder. “He has done all kinds of evil things and will get his retribution.”

Su Hui nodded, his topic jumping. “I actually went to S University.”

“Really?” Ning Yixiao was somewhat surprised.

“Mm, two years ago.” Su Hui smiled. “Although I knew you should have already graduated and wouldn’t be at school at that time, I still went. Having been trapped in Canada before, I went there by myself in the second week after arriving in the US.”

Ning Yixiao had indeed already graduated; two years ago, his company had already gotten on track.

“Did you go in?”

Su Hui shook his head. “No. Don’t know why, but it felt like if I went in, I might feel even sadder instead, clearly knowing you wouldn’t be there. Hesitated for a long time, and still didn’t go in. Just by the roadside of the school gate, I sat for an afternoon.”

“What were you doing sitting there?”

“Watching.” Su Hui said. “Watching those students coming in and out, carrying backpacks and wearing headphones. I hoped very much that you would be inside, but there wasn’t, and I also knew you wouldn’t appear, just wanted to take a look.”

“Later I found out that almost every student was very happy and fulfilled. So later I figured it out, because I knew that if you attended school here and realized your dream, you would definitely be very happy too. Whether I could see you with my own eyes didn’t matter that much anymore.”

Ning Yixiao suddenly felt a bit sad.

The Su Hui back then must have been like an unwanted little stray cat, watching everyone coming and going at the school gate, looking forward with extended neck, and finally leaving in disappointment.

“I took the night bus back and also had a very long dream on the way. Dreamed of you, very satisfied.”

“Dreamed of what?” Ning Yixiao asked.

Su Hui smiled. “Just dreamed of you programming in the library. You said you invented a language yourself and even taught me to use it, but I was so stupid and couldn’t learn it. You then said you didn’t need to learn it anymore, ‘I will use this language to make a small program for you to use.’ I asked what it was used for, and you said to keep me company and talk to me when I’m bored.”

Ning Yixiao suddenly froze.

The dream he spoke of seemed to connect with reality.

“A very strange dream,” Su Hui said.

He snapped back to reality, waking up from this dream that felt like a prophecy, and smiled too.

For a split second, Ning Yixiao wanted to tell Su Hui something, but he chose not to say it, so as to give him a surprise.

Su Hui stared at the sea, his voice drawn far away by the sea breeze. “Ning Yixiao, do you know there is a term called ‘the dream of the banana and the deer’?”

Ning Yixiao shook his head. “What does it mean?”

“It’s an allusion that Su Shi also adapted—Awakening from a dream feels truly identical to the deer covered by the banana; accompanying you to take off your shoes brings self-transcendence. ②” Su Hui explained, “The dream of the banana and the deer means mistaking reality for a dream, unable to distinguish between a dream or being awake. For a long time, I was like this, especially after encountering you again, it seems to have become more severe.”

“Why?”

Ning Yixiao took off his coat and draped it over Su Hui’s shoulders.

“Because before, I would frequently generate hallucinations, most of which were hallucinations about you. I treated that as real. Even if sometimes I could distinguish it and knew it was fake, I would still be like this. But after encountering you, I didn’t quite dare to believe that you were still willing to talk to me, help me, and even have some intimate actions. So I would treat you as a hallucination, because I felt that only in a hallucination would you not hate me.”

Ning Yixiao held his hand. “Because those letters had no echo.”

Su Hui was silent for a while. “Don’t know.”

To him, it wasn’t just these reasons; Ning Yixiao could have many possibilities of falling in love with others and spurning himself.

He smiled. “The dream of the banana and the deer, isn’t it very fitting?”

“Mm.”

The tide was gradually rising.

After a moment of silence, Ning Yixiao spoke, “I read a paper before and even shared it with Jingming, but he didn’t agree, feeling that casting aside biological study to research this kind of topic is meaningless.”

“What topic?”

“Regarding touch.” Ning Yixiao explained, “Strictly speaking, it’s a study in physics. There was a period when I constantly felt life was very meaningless, so I read some books and papers regarding physics. A scholar proposed a concept: if based on strict physics definition rather than biology, touch does not exist in this world.”

Su Hui froze for a moment. “What does it mean?” He grabbed Ning Yixiao’s hand. “This doesn’t count as touch?”

“Mm.” Ning Yixiao used his finger to draw two simple atoms on the sand, marking the atomic nucleus. “For example, this is a small atom on your finger, and this is mine. These two atoms look as if they have touched together, but actually they haven’t. The outside of the atomic nucleus is wrapped with an electron cloud. In reality, this contact is the interaction between the Coulomb repulsion between the same poles of the electron cloud and the Van der Waals force between the positive and negative poles. Actually, they didn’t really touch together or even overlap, otherwise a reaction would occur.”

“What reaction?” Su Hui blinked his eyes.

“If my atomic nucleus and your atomic nucleus overlapped, it might trigger nuclear fusion. Of course, we all know this is impossible; holding hands and kissing won’t trigger nuclear fusion. In quantum mechanics, there is also a very fundamental rule called the Pauli exclusion principle, which clearly defines that no two electrons can possess the exact same quantum state, so it’s also impossible for overlap in position to occur. Therefore, in these strict definitions, people and people, people and all things in the world are unable to touch, like a floating dream.”

“Even if we do the most intimate things, we haven’t touched each other; it’s floating,” Su Hui murmured.

Ning Yixiao nodded. “Casting aside biology, under the definition of physics, it can indeed be said so.”

“How miraculous.” Su Hui couldn’t help but sigh. “Thinking like this, it seems many regrets are no longer that regrettable, because originally we were also just isolated one by one, just floating very, very close to each other’s side for a period of time, nothing more.”

Ning Yixiao said softly, “Even the atoms composing various parts of our bodies repel each other and are floating. Human beings themselves are like a dream.”

Su Hui suddenly became at peace with many things. Losing isn’t scary; everyone is a floating dream, drifting with nothing to rely on. Since one has never possessed, how can one talk about losing?

Even the six years he minded most in his heart seemed to have just pulled the floating distance between them a bit further, nothing more.

Su Hui also felt lucky.

In the whole world, probably only Ning Yixiao would chat with him like this, tolerating his unconstrained imagination, and understanding him like this despite being a completely opposite person to himself.

Thinking up to here, Su Hui turned his head, burrowed into Ning Yixiao’s embrace, and hugged him very tightly. Under the moonlight, their shadows overlapped together, looking like a true touch.

“What’s wrong?” Ning Yixiao’s voice was deep and gentle.

“Nothing.” Su Hui shook his head in his embrace. “Ning Yixiao, are all the atoms in your entire body repelling me right now?”

Ning Yixiao smiled, finding him very cute, and rubbed his hair. “Mm, you too.”

Su Hui immediately said, “Then when we hug in the future, we must use a bit more force. Although we can’t touch, we have to be very, very close, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Must hug many times every day.”

“Okay.”

Even if life is just an illusionary dream, one must dream the dream closest to each other.

__

Author’s Note:

①: From the autobiography The Life of Saint Teresa of Jesus

②: From Su Shi’s Following the Rhyme of Liu Gongfu’s Harmony with Han Kanggong’s Remembrance of Zhiguo, Two Poems