Chapter Thirty-Eight: Telephone

When the phone call came, Jiang Chuan was washing vegetables and cooking in the communal kitchen of the tenement building. It was an old building from the 1940s, with six households per floor sharing the same kitchen. The stairwell was filled with the musty smell of years of accumulated waste and the stench of leftover food.

After his parents passed away, Jiang Chuan moved back to his university dormitory, leaving only his grandmother in the empty dormitory building.

But she was getting old and her legs were not very agile. She was also delirious due to excessive grief and often muttered to herself in front of the empty chair where her father had sat. So even though he was very busy with his studies, he would still take the time to come back and visit her.

Jiang Chuan stood in front of the public water pool rinsing the vegetables. The dirt on the vegetable leaves flowed through his fingers into the filthy sewer through the cold water from the pipes.

Suddenly, a cacophony of footsteps echoed in the hallway. Aunt Zhang, the neighbor, was walking by with her perpetually excited Teddy dog, its paws slapping against the damp cement tiles.

"Xiao Jiang!" She saw Jiang Chuan standing by the sink in the distance, her drawn-out voice echoing in the corridor.

"Your phone number is at the convenience store downstairs! They said it's urgent!" Her cheeks were flushed red from years of high blood pressure, and her skin was covered with fine red spiderwebs, like a cheap balloon about to burst. She passed Jiang Chuan in the narrow corridor.

"I told you, remember?"

Jiang Chuan turned off the gushing tap, water droplets dripping from his wrist onto the cement floor. He calmly dried his hands, took off his apron, and thanked her.

The old wooden staircase creaked under his feet, and the railing groaned with each step. The plastic curtain at the convenience store entrance flapped in the wind, and Jiang Chuan could see from afar the telephone receiver leaning to one side on the counter.

He couldn't guess who was calling him, after all, back then, to avoid debt collectors, even their relatives rarely knew where they had moved to. But this person not only knew his address clearly, but also dialed this number that even he himself couldn't remember.

In this age of widespread mobile phone use, the fact that a strange person knew where he lived but didn't call him directly made Jiang Chuan feel vaguely uneasy.

He greeted the shop owner, picked up the old red landline phone on the front desk, and held the receiver to his ear.

"Hello!" Polite yet distant.

A regular static crackled through the receiver; the other end seemed to be holding its breath, waiting. Jiang Chuan's fingers tapped unconsciously on the glass counter.

"Are you Jiang Yun, expert?" The person on the other end of the line was an unfamiliar man with a refined and deep voice who sounded very polite.

"I am his son. What can I do for you?" Jiang Chuan guessed which creditor he had never met before, and his tone unconsciously softened.

"I am a friend of Mr. Cao Jing. Please pass on a message to your father."

After a brief pause, the other person continued, "Tell him to stay away from other people's wives."

The convenience store's freezer suddenly started, emitting a muffled hum. Jiang Chuan saw his elongated, distorted reflection through the glass door, overlapping with the empty street behind him.

His fingers tightened slightly around the receiver. "What do you mean?"

The man's words were both veiled and direct, but Jiang Chuan seemed unable to fully understand or accept them at once. All of this seemed too distant and absurd to him.

Cao Jing was his former piano teacher, the woman he remembered who would slip him candy after class and tap his hand with a ruler for incorrect fingering. He hadn't seen her since her company went bankrupt. Her face had become blurry in Jiang Chuan's memory, leaving only a gentle and slender silhouette.

Now, a man claiming to be her husband's friend is politely asking her to pass on a message to her father, who has been dead for two months, through a public phone. It all sounds absurdly terrifying.

He remembered Cao Jing's husband; his parents would occasionally take Jiang Chuan to visit him during holidays. He was a taciturn man, short and thin, with a limp, whose eyes held an unsettling glint, and who often secretly observed their every move from the shadows.

According to his mother, he used to have some underworld connections and many enemies, which is when he became disabled. After that, his parents didn't visit him as often. Jiang Chuan didn't know if it was because of the man's special status or because they simply didn't like him.

Jiang Chuan remembered that his surname was Bai. Yes, of course he should remember his surname, because his daughter had also studied piano with him.

Whenever it was time for class, Cao Jing would bring her to his house. He remembered that the girl would often secretly share half of her snacks with him, her face flushed, behind her mother's back. Whenever it was his turn to practice, the girl would sit beside him, gazing at him intently.

Jiang Chuan couldn't remember what the girl looked like, but he found her name somewhat pleasant to hear and remembered it to this day. Thinking of this, Jiang Chuan forced himself to pull his wandering thoughts back.

"You can check your father's phone, or ask your mother who already knows. I believe it shouldn't be difficult to figure this out." The voice on the other end of the phone carried a nauseating calmness, each word like poison dipped in honey.

“Mr. Jiang, I’ve heard a little about your family’s situation. Please feel free to make any requests.”

The man spoke with great patience, pausing deliberately before uttering any threats. "My friend certainly hopes things can be resolved peacefully. But if necessary, he won't rule out using extreme measures."

"You shouldn't have called me!"

Jiang Chuan's throat tightened, but his emotions remained largely calm. His gaze was fixed on a stain on the glass counter, the dried mud spot's edges cracked like a spiderweb. He heard his own voice mechanically ring out.

"This is your business."

"Of course, but your father only listens to you, doesn't he?"

The man's voice, tinged with the smugness of a victor, came through the receiver, exerting an invisible pressure on Jiang Chuan. He hated this feeling, as if a large, wet hand was pressing him hard into the mud.

"After all, your father wouldn't risk his son's future for a woman." A sense of smugness and self-satisfaction emanated from him, as if he were already a pawn on a chessboard, completely at the mercy of others.

"I'm afraid that won't work." Jiang Chuan unconsciously tightened the red telephone cord, his fingertips turning red from the force. He was completely unaware of it.

“Because he’s already dead,” he said numbly into the phone.

He heard his own voice, as distant as if it were coming from underwater, and his fingernails unconsciously scratched repeatedly along the marks on the cash register. He needed that hard, cold touch, something certain, something that wouldn't betray him.

He hung up the phone, his fingers trembling slightly, feeling as if all his strength had been drained. He mechanically walked home and pulled out his long-forgotten cell phone from his bedside table.

He hadn't touched it since the funeral. Jiang Chuan looked at the last phone call from Cao Jing on the day his parents' car accident occurred, and the truth buried beneath the surface gradually surfaced.

Fatigue driving, oncoming vehicles illegally changing lanes—all crumbled into untenable lies in the face of irrefutable evidence of infidelity. He suddenly found it utterly ridiculous, letting out a short, mocking laugh.

Grandma looked at him with worry through the window. He looked at her, his eyes carrying a coldness and indifference that he himself was unaware of.

The long-standing discord between his mother and grandmother, the rifts he had deliberately downplayed, and the evidence he had deliberately concealed and ignored, were all brought to the surface with this phone call.

Grandma had always disliked my mother for her weak nature and had made things difficult for her at every turn while she was alive. And now, she might be the last witness to this sordid affair. This realization was like a bucket of cold water poured over his head, leaving him with only disgust and helplessness towards everything.

But he dared not ask further, dared not investigate, for fear that it would be the last straw that broke the camel's back. He decided to keep the matter buried deep in his heart, to preserve the last shred of dignity for this already torn-up family.

Before bankruptcy, they were a family that everyone envied, with warm moments that he still remembers vividly.

But the once warm scenes became suspicious after this phone call, like old photos soaked by rain, every detail distorted and peeling away, revealing the rotten and decaying truth beneath.

The elegant and gentle piano teacher instantly transformed into the enemy who murdered his parents. If it weren't for that phone call she made to his father, that fragile facade of calm might have lasted much longer.

But she held a knife and precisely sliced ​​through the tempting, delicious cream of the birthday cake, revealing the maggots crawling underneath, cutting his emotions into shock, anger, hurt, and unacceptability.

Memories begin to cruelly dissect themselves. When Cao Jing was demonstrating the piano music to him, was her father secretly gazing at the curve of the back of her neck? When her mother was preparing dinner in the kitchen, was the man who said he was working overtime hiding in the gentle embrace of another woman?

Each question pierced Jiang Chuan's nerves like shards of glass, a fierce tidal wave silently surging within him like a tsunami, shattering the emotional bonds he had built up over the years. He felt the collapse of order, the world suddenly stripped of its color.

The brain seemed to activate some sophisticated protective mechanism, peeling away his senses with the precision of removing a tumor, and a cold, rigid order was being rebuilt within him.

Jiang Chuan felt a strange sense of detachment; his soul hovered above his body, coldly observing it. As the tsunami receded, his heart felt a desolate wasteland; all his emotions were compressed into distant white noise, no longer able to harm him.

In just a few minutes, he completely detached himself from his turbulent emotions. He convinced himself to accept the betrayal of his deceased father, the fact that his family was already broken, and the car accident caused by Cao Jing.

If his parents were still alive, they might be proud of him. After all, in their eyes, he has always been calm and composed, operating like a highly precise machine, always on time and in perfect order.

He put his phone back in the drawer and locked it, then calmly walked back to the kitchen and methodically poured the washed vegetables into the pan to stir-fry. The tomatoes melted into a soft puddle in the hot oil, rising with the steam.

But he suddenly realized that he could no longer smell the sweet and sour aroma of food, as if he had caught a severe cold that would never get better, and the delicious food had turned into a bunch of tasteless cell fibers.

Grandma casually remarked that the food seemed a bit salty today. He was momentarily at a loss for how to react, but reflexively managed a slight smile as he said gently that he would be more careful next time.

His expression was so perfect that he looked no different from an ordinary person, but only he knew that the explosive afternoon, with its overwhelming power, had completely destroyed him.

He became a specimen whose pain receptors had been elegantly severed. Those neural synapses related to trust and love had been uprooted on that afternoon when the phone rang.

What remains in this body now is something more efficient, something that will never again crash due to emotional vulnerabilities.