New File
Once Feng Yan started paying attention to the neighbor next door again, he could never return to his old habits.
Feng Yan didn't dare do anything loudly after realizing that the neighbor next door could hear him too.
Thinking about it, it was terrifying. Every detail of Feng Yan's daily routine had been exposed without his knowledge. If not for that day, he might never have known someone was living next door until the day he moved out.
A completely invisible neighbor.
Come to think of it, this was an excellent subject. Feng Yan got a few ideas and opened a document, deciding to write down the subject for later use.
Feng Yan remembered watching an episode of Doraemon when he was little. Nobita was about to run away from home, so Doraemon gave him a door. If he stuck it onto a wall, it would become a room. He made a lot of noise inside the room, and the neighbor next door heard it and thought it was coming from their other neighbor, so the two of them started arguing.
There was a similar story about stealing space in Detective Conan, where a secret room was hidden inside a house.
Based on that premise, Feng Yan could roughly arrange it like this: The protagonist was a woman renting a self-built house on the outskirts of the city. She always assumed that the couple living next door worked day and night, but she didn't know there was a secret room between the two rooms in her house. That room was where the landlord's mentally ill child lived.
Feng Yan stared at the rows of letters on his computer screen. He could probably write an outline, but he didn't know what would happen next, so he simply put it into his draft outlines. Whether he would write it or not depended on whether he found inspiration in the future. Feng Yan had thirty or forty outlines like that, some of which he had even written when he was in middle school.
Sometimes, when he ran out of ideas, he would open them and look through them, just in case he found something he could use.
One time, after Feng Yan used the bathroom and flushed twice, it suddenly occurred to him that even though Zheng Yixuan had no entertainment at all, he must use the bathroom. Strangely, though, Feng Yan had never heard the sound of a flush. He wondered how Zheng Yixuan managed it.
Feng Yan remembered his conversation with Auntie Lin that day. She had told him that she didn't actually do much cleaning at Zheng Yixuan's place. She only took out the trash and washed the clothes. Zheng Yixuan's room was always very clean, and he had so few daily necessities that she wasn't even sure whether he had used some of them.
“For example, Zheng Yixuan's drinking cup. Every time I came over, the cup was put back in its place. Once, I secretly slipped a small piece of paper underneath it to make sure Zheng Yixuan had used the cup to drink water. After drinking, he put it back exactly where it had been, in precisely the right position.”
Auntie Lin's words echoed in his mind, making Feng Yan compare it to his own cup, which never returned to its original position. Wherever he drank, he would leave the cup there. When he wanted another drink, he had to search the whole room for it.
Feng Yan sank into thought again.
‘Zheng Yixuan can draw, has obsessive-compulsive disorder, likes cleaning, doesn't speak but can socialize, and avoids communicating with others whenever he has a choice. Is it autism or Asperger's?’
Feng Yan touched his chin and racked his brain for information as he began analyzing.
Based on the situation, Zheng Yixuan fit the condition very well. The fact that he had never gone out for three full years made his abnormality obvious, but Auntie Lin had simply assumed he was deaf and mute.
After all, in the minds of many older people, what they called mental illness was the same as hysteria, being a mess, and hallucinations. Mental health problems were taboo for most Asians. One could say that a person would admit to having all kinds of illnesses, but would never admit to having a mental illness.
In their hearts, a person with a mental illness was the worst and most frightening kind of person.
‘Oh, right. Come to think of it, it's been two weeks since I last saw Zheng Yixuan. I keep saying I should be more careful, but in reality, I only remembered him after I made some noise. That means I've actually still been disturbing him.’
Feng Yan took out his phone and looked at it. He scrolled through and checked it, but there wasn't a single message from Zheng Yixuan.
They said you could see a person's personality from their WeChat. Zheng Yixuan's Moments were empty, his profile picture was blank, and he used his real name.
Feng Yan himself didn't particularly like posting on Moments, only occasionally sharing updates about games. He also deliberately posted things about meals and hanging out so his parents would see them, hoping they could catch a few traces of their son's life through his Moments. Feng Yan's father usually liked and commented on the Moments he posted.
Sometimes, to reassure him, Feng Yan would take a bunch of photos of breakfast, set his alarm for 7:30 a.m., and go back to sleep. Otherwise, the old man would send him a message and ask, “Why didn't you eat breakfast? Do you want to get sick because you keep skipping breakfast?”
Feng Yan checked the time. It was already nine-thirty at night. His father probably hadn't gone to sleep yet, so he took a photo of his computer screen and posted it to Moments with the caption, ‘I'm working hard.’
As expected, his father liked it as soon as Feng Yan posted it and left a message: Working hard is good, but go to bed early.
Feng Yan smiled, then turned his attention to something else. After thinking for a moment, he sent Zheng Yixuan a message.
[How have you been? Are you feeling better lately? If I'm bothering you, you have to let me know, and I'll try to change.]
After Feng Yan sent it, he pricked up his ears and listened carefully. There wasn't a sound from the other side at all.
‘Could his phone be on silent because no one has sent him a message for so long?’ Feng Yan wondered.
The only way was to remind him manually. So Feng Yan cleared his throat, coughed twice, tapped the wall twice with his finger, and said, “Big brother, are you there?”
Ten seconds later, a sound came from the other side. There was a light knock on the wall. Then Feng Yan said, “Check your phone. I sent you a message.”
Zheng Yixuan responded to Feng Yan's message: [Okay.]
Feng Yan eagerly typed: [It's so late. Why aren't you asleep yet?]
Zheng Yixuan replied: [I can't sleep.]
Feng Yan continued asking: [Insomnia?]
This time, he didn't answer Feng Yan's question. Instead, he asked in return: [Did you change your keyboard?]
Feng Yan was slightly stunned by the message before typing back: [Yeah, I switched to a silent keyboard. You know I often work in the middle of the night, and I was afraid the sound of typing would disturb you.]
After Feng Yan sent that sentence, Zheng Yixuan stopped replying.
Feng Yan really didn't understand what he meant, so he tried to go over their conversation again, afraid he had typed something offensive.
First, Feng Yan had asked why he wasn't asleep yet. If he hadn't wanted to chat, he would have said he was about to go to sleep or would sleep later instead of saying he couldn't sleep.
Then, since insomnia had become the topic, Feng Yan had naturally followed up by asking something like, ‘Do you suffer from insomnia?’
But Zheng Yixuan hadn't answered. Instead, he had asked whether Feng Yan had changed his keyboard. Maybe it was related to the insomnia he had experienced before. Feng Yan remembered that there were live streams dedicated to white noise, including the sound of mechanical keyboards.
Feng Yan shouldn't have made any mistakes in that conversation.
Or could it be…
Could it be that after being disturbed by noise for a year, Zheng Yixuan had actually grown accustomed to the sound of Feng Yan's keyboard—and now that Feng Yan had suddenly switched to a silent keyboard, Zheng Yixuan couldn't sleep instead?