Chapter 14 Minus 2: Electric shock is no match for hypnosis

On the streets of Shanghai, you can sometimes see the remnants of the old era. Dozens of wires gathered from all directions are rolled up on the poles at the intersection, as if they were randomly stuffed into the pockets, and eventually become a mess A few pairs of earphone cables were magnified a hundred times, and then hung up on a telephone pole, and one or two ends were broken from time to time, which made people feel blocked. And for me, that stuff isn't just a matter of nausea, it's scary.Usually, when encountering such an intersection, I will avoid it far away, and it doesn’t even matter if I need to cross a few more roads because of this.

Because if I get close, there is no guarantee that I will not make the same mistakes as when I was 9 years old. My name is He Liang. I was born in 1980. Within a few months, I can brazenly say that I am under 30 years old.When the subprime mortgage crisis spread to Shanghai, I lost my job, and so far I only earn my living by writing some copywriting for real estate dealers.Just a year and a half ago, it would be a luxury for me to tell you so much nonsense here, but suddenly my busy life took a 180-degree turn, and I didn't know what to do when I was idle, so I remembered Write such nonsense.

What I'm about to tell you next is all true, except for the name, for obvious reasons - I certainly don't want to get myself in trouble for talking about nonsense publicly, so even if it sounds familiar to you , and don't try to pin it on someone you know—or even yourself. Although I have lived for nearly 30 years without any success, but to be honest, if you have the same experience as me, you will know that a person who should have died at the age of 9 has fallen into such a terrible The bad habit of living all the way to the age of 30 requires some amazing luck. When I was 9 years old, I was in the third grade of elementary school, and I was not particularly naughty, because the boys in the class were basically equal in this regard.My family lives in an alley in a small road called Shuidian. Every day, I have to cross two roads to go to Guangling Road No. 2 Primary School, which is about one stop away.In the morning, my dad would always ride a bicycle to send me to school, and in the evening, my mom would pick me up, but after the summer vacation and I was promoted to the third grade, I was told to go home by myself after school.

At that time, on our small road, less than 100 meters away from the first intersection, was the school gate of Hongkou District Labor-study School.I lived there until I graduated from junior high school, and I never saw the two big iron gates open.Although we little demon kings try to look fearless in school, we are just children after all. In our minds, the working-study elementary school is almost like hell, so that I go home after school every day and get out of school. Before crossing this intersection, no classmates are willing to go with me, and I always avoid the gate of the work-study school. I would rather cross the road, go through this section of the road and come back, but also go around.

I remember that there was a heavy rain just before school on the day of the accident, and there was still some pattering in the sky until I was walking on the way to school.The drainage system in that era was far less smooth than it is now, and a lot of water accumulated on the water circuit, almost overflowing the street.After I crossed the road, I thought I would cross the water circuit again as before, but when I saw the foamy and oily sewage accumulated on the road, I was a little discouraged. I turned my head and glanced at the gate of the work-study school—looking closer, it didn't seem so scary.So I decided to make an exception and pass by the door once, and no longer detour-although no classmates were around to testify, and no one would believe me when I went to show off to my classmates the next day, but maybe I will no longer have to detour after today. There are opportunities.

At the gate of the work-study school, above the telephone pole, there is such a mess of wires hanging, with a broken end hanging straight down. After that, I learned about it from my parents, because that memory completely disappeared in my mind.Dad's argument was that I was electrocuted because I was naughty and touched a broken wire. Although I was wearing rubber overshoes, my heart stopped on the spot.Fortunately, the old man at the gate of the work-study school happened to see me (according to the old man, he usually takes a nap at this time in the afternoon, but somehow he woke up that day), and there happened to be a telephone in the guard room ( In those days, not just any house had a telephone),

So I immediately dialed 120, and I saved my life. I don’t know if I was really bored enough to touch the wires, or if my severed head swaying in the wind happened to touch my umbrella-holding wrist.In short, there is no doubt that I experienced a severe electric shock, and I still have a small scar on my left wrist. My elementary school classmates must remember that from September 1989, the man named He Liang The classmates also missed half a semester of classes. After that accident, I was depressed for a while, and I didn't want to talk much. When I had to talk, I just muttered a few words as quietly as possible.In my mother's words, "the soul is gone by the electricity", and my father, who has always been strict, stopped beating and scolding me, and even talked to me carefully—if that accident can really change a child to a certain extent, Not necessarily, but since there are so many benefits to be gained by keeping your voice down, I'm happy to keep pretending like this.

I didn’t do well in the primary school entrance examination and the junior high school examination. I missed the key points of the district with a score of 5.0. My parents didn’t complain a word, so I entered the “garbage middle school” opposite Guangling No. 2 Elementary School. "(In fact, as a traditional football project school, it has also sent a lot of talents to the Shenhua team) No. 52 Middle School.Because of my good grades and my lack of words, I was quite favored by the teachers, but in fact I did not do any bad things—put caterpillars in the girls’ pencil boxes, and sprinkle ashes in the teacher’s teacups. , Go to the barbecue stall at the school gate to eat meat skewers and slip away without paying... It's just that every time I pursue it, I can pass the test safely.At that time, the popular classmates left messages to each other, and the comment I got the most was "You sinister guy"-I remember, my nickname in junior high school was "rat spirit".

However, "to be investigated later" and "to be caught on the spot" are completely different things.I remember that was the first time I went to the snack bar on the east side of the school to eat raw fried food and escape without paying. Probably too many students had done this before, and the owner was finally angered. With the three guys chasing us four fleeing students, they finally captured us one by one and turned them over to the teaching office. When Mr. Xu, the teacher in charge of the class, came to the teaching office in a panic, he was taken aback when he saw me, and then he pretended to regret and said, He Liang, I didn’t expect you to be too... Then there was a series of frightening and embarrassing words——————————————————————————————— I don't remember much of what he said.What I remember is that when I heard the word "punishment", I finally couldn't help crying. At that moment, I almost concluded that I would be sent to work-study school.

In the next week, I waited all the time for people from the work-study school to walk into the classroom under the leadership of Teacher Xu and take me away.When I got home from school on Saturday (at that time it was a five-and-a-half-day workweek, with one week off on Saturday and one week off), I almost collapsed. At that time, I felt that death would be more comfortable than this—I remembered being electrocuted when I was 9 years old. He told himself that if he died like that, it wouldn’t be painful at all, so he took a flat-blade screwdriver from Dad’s tool drawer and stabbed the electrical socket on the wall.

Thinking about it now, I was really stupid and terrible when I was a child, and I might have lost my life casually, but that time, I think it was the wooden floor at home that saved me. I was just stunned by the electric shock and just lay on the ground until My mother came home and patted me awake, and said, why did I sleep on the floor, and I was going to sleep on the bed, and my mother never asked about the strange screwdriver on the ground. Will ignore this little detail.Maybe she knew it already in her heart, but she was just pretending to be confused. That electric shock was the beginning of it all.When I woke up, I was in a better mood than I've ever been, and I wanted to scream with joy - I don't understand, I was a near collapse a few hours ago, a high school student who tried to electrocute himself!Why should I kill myself?I thought it was weird, it was crazy—and a few weeks later, when I received the notice of warning and punishment, I heard the whole story from my classmates—I still remember being twisted by the snack boss, I pinched the back of my neck and sent it to the teaching office, but I don’t remember anything after that. That memory was completely wiped away, like being erased by an eraser. Well, I have talked about so many absurd things that are not worth mentioning in my childhood. In fact, what I want to tell you is that when I was 13 years old, I learned to use electric shock to delete my memory. This habit sounds scary. Once or twice, I really almost killed myself. The feeling of electric current passing through my heart is like crossing the road to the gate of hell, but I am no stranger to that place.But after a few tries, I found the way—as long as the current does not pass through the heart, there is no danger of life, and it is enough to get an electric shock with one hand.When I was deeply troubled by a bad mood, the electric shock was very effective. After waking up, the harmful mood and the accompanying memory were erased together. In high school, my skills became more and more proficient-I learned to use electrodes on two temples to erase memories, which is more effective-the two probes of the multimeter are really useful electrodes. The 110V converter also increases the safety of electric shock.This is probably why you asked me which stage of my student days I like the most, and I will answer your high school without hesitation. I have almost reached the point where I can delete negative memories as I like-the guilt of picking up a classmate’s wallet and embezzling it, a thousand The frustration of being humiliated by classmates for failing the test, the anxiety of masturbating for the first time, failing the test...all of them were deleted by me. —Perhaps you will wonder, how do I conclude that erased knowledge is bad memory?You are right, in fact, no one can be 100% accurate when deleting memories, but basically before turning on the power, I will roughly write down the paragraphs that need to be deleted on paper, as my own The basis for whether they were all successfully deleted.Sometimes those irrelevant memories also occasionally fall victim to the electric shock, which is also inevitable. the University?There's almost nothing to say, college has far fewer memories to erase than rebellious middle school, and sometimes I just take boring memories to make sure my craft isn't rusty.It wasn't until my senior year, when I learned that my first love girlfriend was cheating on me, and finally broke up with her, that the skill really came into use. When my roommates were amazed that I was back to normal in a day, I even The woman's name has been forgotten. In this way, life is stored in my brain piece by piece.At that time, I thought that the experience I had accumulated could fully master the craft, but in the end, something went wrong. It happened in 2005.At that time, I had a girlfriend named "Xiao Qi", who was my high school classmate.After graduating from high school, everyone was admitted to different universities, and they had no contact at all during the university years. They met again at the class reunion after graduation, only to find out that they had a crush on each other, so they got together soon.At that time, we had already lived together, and she was about to graduate as a graduate student in the Department of Psychology of China Normal University, and we also started to mention some topics about marriage from time to time. I was working in an advertising agency at the time, and you know, advertising agencies are notoriously stressful.Around autumn, I began to suffer from insomnia. If it was something on my mind, there was really nothing to worry about, but I would just lie on the bed and toss and turn until it was dawn before I could sleep for a while.I tried shocking myself, but it only made things worse, I screwed up a few times at work due to amnesia, never got a promotion, and was lucky not to get fired. So one night, when Qi proposed to use her new hypnosis technique to help me fall asleep, I agreed without thinking. The hypnosis was very effective, and I finally got a taste of dreaming again. After that, I fell asleep in my girlfriend's hypnotherapy almost every day, and that kind of happiness lasted for almost half a year. Like I told you before, I was completely unaware of the existence of the problem, and even thought there was such a I feel lucky to have a girlfriend who understands hypnosis. But just like the electric shock when I was 9 years old, the outbreak of misfortune is always very sudden-one morning in spring, when everyone else wakes up in the warm sunshine, washes their faces and brushes their teeth, eats a breakfast, and feels refreshed. What happened to me when I headed straight to work was — I sat up in bed with a splitting headache and my head felt like it was going to explode.Those nasty memories clogged up in my head, worse even than the tangle of wires on a telephone pole.From junior high school until the last time I energized myself, all the memories I deleted came back in one go—when I lay down on the toilet and vomited out the overnight meal together with stomach acid, I became conscious I saw what happened—the erased memories didn’t disappear, it was more like being temporarily stored in the “recycle bin”, and maybe I said something that shouldn’t be said after someone wrote it, or Xiao Qi’s Curious, anyway, she "recovered" them all with hypnotism. Hypnotized!I should have expected such a dangerous thing-but it's too late to say anything now.It would be unbearable for anyone to discover so many dirty secrets at once—as I expected, there was no sign of her anywhere in the house. But what really terrified me was the blood in the bathroom. The blood dripping on the bathroom floor has been pointing to the bathtub.The bathtub has been washed by water, but there are still blood stains on the faucet, and the washstand is also full of smeared blood.I checked my body and there was no wound.I didn't dare to speculate, I just tried my best to recall what happened last night, but I couldn't remember anything. Instead, what rushed into my mind were those horror legends that I didn't want to touch the most-I dreamed of cutting things at night. Watermelon, when she woke up, she found in her arms the head of the person next to her pillow that had also been split in half. The clock on the wall said it was a quarter past nine, but I had no intention of going to work.I carefully checked the belongings belonging to Xiao Qi at home—the purses, wallets, and mobile phones were all gone, but cosmetics, clothes, PSP, and daily necessities.It's all still — well, maybe I'm overthinking it, she's just gone.I took out my phone and dialed her number. Not in service area. I was tempted to call her parents or classmates, but wasn't sure if that was the right thing to do in this situation. —at least I have to figure out what I did before I decide what to do. That being said, what exactly happened that night remains a mystery to this day.All I know is that from that day on, Xiao Qi disappeared from my life.She hasn't come back for a month, her phone is never in the service area, MSN has never been online, and her things are just at home, and she hasn't come back to get them—even if it's a ruthless thing like asking someone to come back and get them None of that happened, and I can't think of anything worse. But soon something worse happened—one month later, on a Saturday, I received a call from Xiao Qi’s father at home. What he said was that she hadn’t been home for more than a month. The phone calls are always unreachable, even if we are busy with our business, even if we are planning to set up another company, we should go home every one or two weeks to have a look. I am extremely terrified and authentic, huh?She also hasn't been home for a month, we had a fight, she left that night and never came back, I thought she went back to her mother's house - I lied. The other end of the phone also became anxious, anxious to meet me - within half an hour, her father appeared at the door of my house.I didn't dare to invite him in, he didn't care about it at all, he just kept saying that Xiao Qi hadn't come back, did you go out to look for her, did you look for her classmates? To be honest, I didn't look for anyone, just spent a month alone in fear, looking forward to the day after get off work to find that she had cooked dinner at home for me to eat - only to realize that it was impossible is happening. —I have searched, but there is no news about Xiao Qi, and they say they have never seen her!I pretended to be anxious and said to Xiao Qi's father. What should I do, what should I do - but I dare not let him go to the police, not even mentioning a word, his father suddenly asked me, are all her things still there?I want to take it back. — she took them all, one lie after another — who knows if there will be any evidence against me left on those things? Her father left without saying anything more. That day, I didn't even bother to eat lunch, and brought back two large barrels of chlorine bleach from the Carrefour supermarket.I washed the bathroom inside and out with bleach, and wiped the floors and walls of each room carefully twice. I changed the sheets and mats, threw them in the bathtub, and dumped almost a catty. Soak it in bleach—a strong oxidizing agent that destroys invisible blood so thoroughly that even luminol or phenol can't detect it, which I learned from CSI. I sorted out all the things left by Xiao Qi and piled them up into a pile—what should I do with these things? Just throw it away slowly. After that, I took one or two with me every time I went out and threw them in the trash cans all over the city—even her favorite AnnaSui wallet and PSP game console were thrown away mercilessly.I waited for the police to knock on my door all the time, and I didn't dare to shock myself, for fear that I would forget something that shouldn't be forgotten, and the insomnia would return—but the police never showed up. It was almost half a year after Xiao Qi disappeared that I dared to ask my classmate's schoolmate at China Normal University to go to the Department of Psychology to find out the news. The answer I had to bring was: Qi Yunfei?She hasn't been seen in school for several months. It's strange that her father gave her a suspension before writing her master's thesis—there are rumors that she disappeared! This event completely changed my life—on the good side, I quit shocking myself because of it; but on the bad side, that benefit was nothing compared to the fact that I lost my soon-to-be-married girlfriend, and I My career has fallen back to the worst state, I can't sleep, and I can't control my fantasies about how to deal with the police's questioning... The days passed day by day, as if they might crush me down and destroy me at any time—three years passed like this.In the past three years, no one came to me because of Qi Yunfei.This matter was almost forgotten by everyone. When the May Day holiday came this year, I decided to go to Raffles City to buy some discounted clothes because I received the "May Day Discount Map" emails from boring classmates.Like most new post-millennium trendy shopping malls, Raffles City is a transparent structure with an atrium - from one side of the mall there is an unobstructed view to the opposite. The moment I walked out of the Giordano concept store with two shopping bags, my sight was attracted by a couple in the opposite direction at 12 o'clock.The woman was wearing trendy hot pants and flip flops, with her legs almost exposed, and she had her arms around a man I had never seen before.The two were chatting and laughing affectionately, walking towards me along the circular fence, until they got very close, only to find that there was a man holding two bags of clothes in both hands, standing still, staring at me. They—to be precise, strange men staring at the woman.The two of them slowed down, with disdainful expressions on their faces, as if they were thinking about whether to avoid my trouble. "Qi Yunfei?" When they crossed me two meters away from me, I turned my head and called out the name that I had hesitated for a long time. The two stopped in their tracks, and both turned their heads. The man whispered in the woman's ear, "Do you know him?"The woman frowned, as if trying to remember my name, but finally shook her head in confusion. "Are you..." she asked cautiously. Almost instinctively, I immediately realized what was happening—the same thing I had done to the woman I had cheated on my senior year. She doesn't seem to remember me at all. I tried to find an excuse for why I knew her name, but I couldn't think of any reasonable excuse for a while—in the end, I just shrugged, turned and left, leaving the suspicious couple, together with those fragments of memory, They all left behind.