When the paramedic touched my wrist, I threw up.
There was nothing left in my stomach. All I brought up was a little sour water, which trickled down along the leg of the police station desk.
Someone pulled out a chair. Someone else said to get a plastic bag. Several pairs of shoes moved toward me at once. With my back pressed against the desk, my right shoulder numb with pain, I still clutched both hands over my mouth.
Don't let me speak.
Don't touch me.
The paramedic in the dark blue uniform crouched two steps away and stopped with his hand suspended in midair.
"I won't touch you," he said. "Your clothes have been wet for too long, and you look terrible. I'll check whether you're breathing normally first."
I stared at his mouth.
It was a man's voice.
At least for now.
He asked my name. I didn't answer. Lu Bo'an turned the paper on the desk toward him. On it was my crookedly written name, along with the words: Not me.
The paramedic asked again, "Does your chest hurt?"
I didn't know.
My chest had been hurting ever since the office. One moment it felt like someone was pressing down on it; the next, it felt hollow and cold. I couldn't even tell whether it was my heart, my lungs, or Lin Xu's voice still lodged inside me.
I nodded, then immediately shook my head.
"Are your hands numb?"
I lowered my head to look at them.
My fingertips were turning white, and my ring finger was swollen around both sides of the silver ring. My palms were drenched in sweat, and the damp mark from the phone-release form I had pressed against them still hadn't dried.
The paramedic followed my gaze and saw the ring.
"Your finger's swollen. We might need to—"
I suddenly shoved my right hand into my armpit.
The chair overturned.
The metallic crash against the floor made everyone in the police station look over. A strange breathy sound escaped my throat. My knees hit the floor, and pain flashed white across my vision.
"We're not taking it off. We're not taking it off." The paramedic immediately backed away. "We won't deal with the ring yet."
He retreated.
But then an elderly woman waiting by the door to give her statement suddenly spoke.
"Don't pressure him."
Her normally hoarse voice had become very soft.
"Yanchuan presses his right hand against his chest even when he's asleep. If you take it away, he'll wake up."
Kneeling on the floor, I forgot to breathe.
The elderly woman's son looked down at her.
"Mom, what are you talking about?"
She blinked twice, as if she'd just returned from somewhere far away.
"I said... don't hurt him."
She didn't know me.
There was no way she could know that I pressed the ring against my chest while I slept.
That was a habit Lin Xu had trained into me.
When we had just started dating, I turned over in the middle of the night and reached beneath my pillow. She woke up, couldn't find the ring, turned on the light, and questioned me for twenty minutes, asking whether I wanted to hide her even in my sleep. After that, whenever she slept beside me, I kept my right hand on my chest, as if guarding something that could easily be stolen.
The paramedic glanced at the elderly woman, then turned back to me.
His expression had changed.
It wasn't Lin Xu's expression.
It was the look of someone who had seen something that shouldn't exist and wanted to pretend he hadn't.
"Let's get him to the hospital first," Lu Bo'an said.
I immediately shook my head.
The ambulance doors would close.
There would be even more people in the hospital.
I grabbed a pen and wrote on the paper:
Don't seal me in.
The pen tip tore through the paper.
After reading it, the paramedic said the rear doors couldn't be opened while the ambulance was moving, but he could let me sit near the door and wouldn't strap me down. Before doing anything, he would tell me first.
I still didn't want to go.
But I couldn't stand up. My knees shook whenever I put weight on them, my wet shirt clung to my back, and my teeth began chattering uncontrollably.
In the end, I climbed onto the stretcher myself.
I didn't let them lift me.
The moment the rear doors closed, I still grabbed the handle.
I pulled it three times.
The paramedic didn't stop me. He just sat across from me and let me pull. The door was locked tight, and each attempt produced only a dry, hard click.
"You always have to try three times before you'll stop," he suddenly said.
My hand froze on the handle.
He froze too.
"What?"
I shrank backward, hitting the back of my head against the wall of the ambulance.
The paramedic raised a hand as if to check on me, then stopped before touching me. His lips moved, as if he wanted to explain, but in the end he said nothing.
Lu Bo'an sat near the rear doors, his palm pressed over the crumpled paper. He had seen it.
He didn't tell me not to be afraid.
The light inside the ambulance was painfully white. Rainwater sprayed up beneath the tires and kept striking the undercarriage. Every time I heard it, I thought someone was slapping the doors from outside.
When we reached the emergency department, the paramedic said my body temperature was low, my heart was beating too fast, and my right shoulder and knee needed to be examined.
While filling out the paperwork, Lu Bo'an asked whether there was anyone I wanted notified.
I held the pen and wrote Cheng Xiaoqing's surname first, then covered it with my palm. The forty-one faces in the office turning toward me in unison were still in my head. I didn't want to call her, but I didn't want to be left here alone either.
Lu Bo'an didn't take the paper away.
In the end, I moved my hand away myself, finished writing her name after "Cheng," and nodded once.
All I heard was "I need her."
Lin Xu loved those words most.
You need to eat.
You need to go to bed earlier.
You need to turn on your location so I won't worry.
After every sentence, there was nowhere for me to choose.
An emergency nurse took a pair of scissors and started cutting through the wet sleeve stuck to my shoulder. The moment I saw the blade, I recoiled into the corner of the bed, knocking the IV stand so hard it swayed.
"It's just clothing," she said.
I shook my head.
"If I don't cut it, I can't see the injury."
I still shook my head.
She reached out and grabbed the cuff.
I pushed her away with my left hand.
It wasn't much force, but her whole body stopped.
The curtains around the two neighboring beds were pulled open at the same time.
A man with tape covering the back of his hand poked his head out.
"Don't let him stay in wet clothes," he said. "His shoulders curl up when he falls asleep. He'll definitely be in pain tomorrow."
A woman behind the nurses' station continued, "His socks need to be changed too. If his feet are cold, he can't sleep."
A caregiver pushing a wheelchair past us added in a low voice, "His pillow can't be too high. He'll have nightmares."
Three voices.
Two men and a woman.
None of them were Lin Xu's.
But they knew.
The nurse's hand was still gripping my sleeve. She looked at those people, her expression even more confused than mine.
The next second, her thumb gently rubbed my arm.
That was how Lin Xu used to soothe me.
"Be good," the nurse said. "You'll sleep better in dry clothes."
I knocked her hand away and fell off the other side of the bed.
My right shoulder hit the floor first.
When the pain exploded, I finally cried out. The sound was short and hoarse, but I immediately clamped both hands around my throat, afraid some other words might use it to come out.
The nurse, the patients, and the caregiver all moved toward me.
"Don't come any closer!"
The instant the words left my mouth, I was even more terrified.
They stopped for one second.
Only one second.
"You'll catch a cold."
"The floor is filthy."
"You need to lie back down."
Every one of them was worried about me.
Not one of them listened to me.
I kicked backward, my soles slipping across the polished floor. The wall was behind me, the bed to my left, and more and more people were closing in from the right. Farther away, others heard the commotion and stood up from the waiting area.
They didn't need to know me.
As long as Lin Xu wanted them to, they would know that I was afraid of the cold, that I ground my teeth, which hand I habitually placed against my chest, and that when I woke in the middle of the night, I would first reach for the other side of the bed.
She was dead.
But the way I slept was still in the hands of the whole city.
"Everyone, back up."
Lu Bo'an stepped in front of me.
His voice was urgent, nothing like the "Put it back on and it won't hurt" in the patrol car.
I still didn't dare believe him.
He didn't turn around to touch me either. He simply spread his arms, blocking the people who were approaching.
The nurse frowned. "The patient may need sedation."
"He's already said not to come closer," Lu Bo'an said.
"He'll hurt himself."
"Let him see you stop first."
They argued.
Every sentence passed over my head, as if I were no longer here.
A folded sheet of paper suddenly slid under the curtain.
There was only the paper. No hand.
It stopped half a meter from my toes. The writing was large enough for me to read without moving closer.
Gu Yanchuan, this is Cheng Xiaoqing. I'm outside.
There was a blank line beneath it.
Can I come in?
I stared at it for a long time before dragging the paper toward me.
The people around me were still talking. The nurse said they couldn't let me sit on the floor forever. Lu Bo'an said to wait a little longer. Someone behind me told me not to be difficult.
Only the words on the page hadn't taken a single step forward.
I picked up the pen that had fallen beside the bed and wrote one word.
No.
I pushed the paper back outside the curtain.
There were no departing footsteps outside the curtain, and no one forced their way in.
After a while, the paper was pushed back inside:
Okay. I'm outside.
I stared at that one word.
The pressure in my chest didn't ease, and my hands were still shaking. But at least this time, after I said no, everything really stopped.
I turned the paper toward Lu Bo'an.
After reading it, he stepped aside.
The nurse followed his lead and stepped back too.
At last, a small patch of floor opened up between me and the crowd.
No one touched me.
I leaned against the wall and panted, each breath shorter than the last. My gaze moved from their shoes to their faces, then back to their shoes. I didn't know which mouth would call me Yanchuan next.
The man with the taped-up hand was still watching me from beside the bed.
Suddenly, I remembered something.
Something Lin Xu couldn't possibly know.
Not because she had never asked.
But because every time, I pretended to be asleep and never said it out loud.
Back then, she would lie beside me with her phone between our two pillows, the location screen glowing all night. Whenever I turned over, she would ask if I couldn't sleep, if there was something I refused to tell her.
So I learned not to move.
With my eyes closed, I would mentally recite a bus route from the first stop. I'd recite it to the end, then go back the other way. It was the route I took to my grandmother's house as a child, and the only place I could leave her inside my head.
Lin Xu knew what time I fell asleep. She knew how many times I woke each night.
She didn't know that I escaped every night.
I lowered the hand clamped around my throat.
"When I pretended to be asleep," I asked, "which bus route was I reciting in my head?"
Lu Bo'an turned his head.
The nurse didn't answer.
The patient opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
In the waiting area, the people who had been talking fell silent one after another.
Even the footsteps outside the curtain stopped.
For the first time, no one in the entire emergency department told me what I needed.
They all looked at me.
Twelve seconds.
Or maybe only three.
I heard my own ragged breathing, the faint clink of the silver ring striking the floor, and rain tapping against the awning over the emergency exit.
No one answered.
She didn't know.