Chapter 57 X
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“Swallows…”
“What?”
“Last night, I dreamed about swallows.”
X sat in the psychologist’s office, undergoing amnesia treatment.
Patients who have experienced major disasters are usually provided with psychological therapy. However, X, who suffers from amnesia, has lost all memories of that disaster. His psychologist primarily helps him recover his memories and find key information that could verify his identity.
“What kind of swallows?” the psychologist asked.
X fell silent.
After waking up from the dream, the scenario seemed blurry, as if shrouded in mist.
“It’s okay, take your time,” the psychologist reassured.
X slowly searched his mind. The doctor advised him to only recall past events during the weekly counseling sessions and not to dwell on lost memories outside of those times. Constantly forcing himself to remember every day could backfire and cause unnecessary headaches.
Scratch, scratch.
The sound of the pen smoothly writing on the soft paper was quite comforting.
X looked at the Eurasian psychologist in front of him, who was proficient in six languages. She wrote the word “swallow” in different languages on the paper and then showed it to X with a smile.
“Now, how many can you understand?” she asked.
X looked at the flying words: Chinese – 燕子, English – Swallow, French – hirondelle.
“Good~ You’re starting to learn a bit of French now,” the psychologist said with satisfaction. “Can we communicate in French?”
X shook his head. “I only know the words.”
The psychologist sighed softly and her tone carried a hint of regret. With an infectious smile on her face, she continued the conversation in Chinese.
She suggested that X should learn more foreign languages in his spare time and continue memorizing vocabulary. People with amnesia tend to dwell on their past and force themselves to remember.
“In your daily life, whenever you feel the urge to dwell on your memories, just go and learn some vocabulary. Whether it’s English, French, or any other language, it can bring peace to your mind.
“Learning languages is also a way to stimulate your brain. The regions of the brain are interconnected, and sometimes just one exposure, one opportunity, might help you remember something crucial. But don’t force it. What’s it called in Chinese? Right, go with the flow.”
X observed the psychologist’s fiery red lips as she spoke. Although her Chinese was fluent, it still carried a hint of exotic accent that felt slightly discordant to him.
— Listening to Chu Feng speak in the game doesn’t give him this sense of discordance.
X reaffirmed that he should be a native Chinese. He is currently in New Caledonia, a South Pacific island country, where the official language is French. Apart from French, Melanesian and Polynesian languages are also commonly used there.
— But he doesn’t know any of those languages.
X recalled two years ago when he woke up on the operating table, surrounded by four or five doctors and nurses chattering away in a language he couldn’t understand.
The doctors assumed he was of Asian descent based on his appearance, but they couldn’t speak Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. In the end, they resorted to communicating in broken English. X had a rough idea of his experience:
He had encountered a major shipwreck, and when he was salvaged, he suffered extensive burns all over his body, ten fractured ribs, massive internal bleeding, a ruptured spleen, plus cranial brain damage… It was beyond the capabilities of an ordinary hospital to save him, so the fishermen who salvaged him had second thoughts and brought him to this medical facility.
This facility, affiliated with Country M, was currently developing a new drug and recruiting “volunteers.” X was well aware that “volunteers” was just a euphemism; in reality, it was illegal human experimentation conducted secretly on this Pacific island nation without anyone noticing.
The mortality rate of that new drug was as high as 67.4%, and X became one of the fortunate survivors in the remaining 32.6%. Thanks to the effects of the drug, his battered body miraculously withstood all the surgeries, saving his life.
Upon discharge, the facility also awarded him an “International Outstanding Volunteer” certificate, written in French.
On the day of his discharge, no one came to see him off, nor did anyone come to pick him up. Wrapped in bandages all over his body, X wheeled himself out of the medical facility’s tiled hall on a wheelchair.
The sunlight outside was intense, making it difficult for him to open his eyes.
As the wheelchair glided out, X didn’t know where to go. He just aimlessly wheeled around. Sometimes, the wheels of the wheelchair got stuck on the uneven road, jammed by pebbles on the path, clattering and clattering, unable to turn smoothly.
Under the bright sunlight, X stopped turning the wheelchair’s wheels. He looked up slightly and saw emerald green bushes by the roadside, now standing at the same height as them. Behind the low bushes lay a sea of sapphire blue.
In island nations like this, where people were scarce, everywhere he went was accompanied by the wailing of the waves.
X looked at the creamy white foam on the azure sea, rising, rising, and then crashing onto the beach, dying, dying, endlessly dying.
With no family, no home, no memories, no money, no passport, no proof of identity, X, with disabilities all over his body, wheeled himself alone in this foreign land where he couldn’t communicate, listening to the sound of the waves dying by the roadside.
***
“Let’s go back now—”
The psychologist said:
“What kind of swallows?”
This was also a process of psychological therapy: the method of returning to chat.
The human brain is a mysterious structure. Sometimes, when words are on the tip of the tongue, they suddenly forget what they were going to say, and the answer that was just read in the book can’t be written in the exam. It’s right there in the mind, ready to come out, but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t remember it.
But once you pass that one point, the conversation ends, the exam ends, suddenly, the words you want to say, the answers you want to write, come out.
So psychologists typically start with a topic: swallows, then set it aside and talk about other things, like French, language vocabulary, Chinese, or X’s past experiences. After a while, she comes back and reintroduces the original topic: swallows.
Through the method of returning to chat, X felt the swallows in his dream become a bit clearer:
“They were black, very small, fluffy…”
“Are the swallows, flying? Singing? Or just, standing there?” The psychologist asked slowly.
“No flying.” X hesitated, as if piecing together a puzzle with thousands of pieces in his mind. “They… were those kinds of young swallows that hadn’t grown up yet, staying in the nest.”
The psychologist swiftly recorded X’s words in her notebook, feeling somewhat excited. After two years, this was the first time her patient had recalled a genuine memory fragment!
Observing a swallow’s nest, and even seeing fluffy young swallows with one’s own eyes, was a precious personal memory scene that not everyone had.
Moreover, swallows are migratory birds, and they have fixed breeding seasons every year. Although the scene of watching the swallow’s nest at that time might only be a brief moment in his memory, it could provide a lot of information about the local environment, climate, geographical location, and even help locate the place where X had once lived.
The psychologist asked, “How do you feel about the shape of that swallow’s nest?”
Different species of swallows build different types of nests, such as house swallows’ nests, barn swallows’ nests, swifts’ nests, each with its own characteristics. House swallows’ nests are generally bowl-shaped, or vase-shaped, or sand cave-shaped…
“Or…” the psychologist continued, “What do you think is special about that swallow?”
X paused for a long time and slowly said, “Their… abdomen has a circle…” X carefully recalled, “There were some yellow feathers.”
The psychologist quickly typed X’s description of the swallow into Google:
“The Golden-bellied Swallow, mainly a summer migrant in China, arrives in different regions of China at different times. Earlier in the south, later in the north.”
After hesitating for a while, X said, “It should be… spring when I saw the swallows.”
The psychologist asked, “That’s in southern China. What about the place where you saw the swallow’s nest? Was it on a tree, or…”
Gradually, the image of a dilapidated corridor floated up in X’s mind, and the gray cement floor became clearer in his mind:
“It was a building, a residential building.”
The psychologist, gripping the pen to jot down notes, also felt excited. Her patient was recalling more and more!
She asked, “A residential building, then… the swallow’s nest should be on the top of the wall. How did you go up to see it? A ladder or…”
“Wooden boxes,” X felt the details of the scene of watching the swallows becoming clearer in his mind. “I stepped on wooden boxes.”
The swallow’s nest was built in the corner between the wall and the ceiling, and the little swallows popped their round heads out, chirping. It was a sunny day, and the sky was very blue…
The psychologist asked, “You, stepped on wooden boxes?”
X immediately realized what she was asking. Before he was injured, he was over six feet tall. He probably only needed to tiptoe to see the baby swallows in the nest, without needing to step on a wooden box at all.
“That was when I… was a child,” X felt the scene in his mind becoming clearer. He was very young at that time, a short figure standing on a wooden box, even having to tiptoe to see the swallow’s nest…
“Wait a minute.”
X suddenly said, “I wasn’t alone when I saw the swallows.”
The psychologist’s pen paused, and she immediately looked up, her eyes filled with both surprise and excitement:
“Someone was with you to see the swallows…?”
“…Yes,” X hesitated for a moment, then affirmed, “Yes, there was a little boy.”
The psychologist tightened her grip on the pen. This information was very important. She thought it was already remarkable that patient X could recall the swallows and the residential building, but unexpectedly, this one swallow fragment extracted the most crucial information about “people.”
——That could be X’s relatives, or friends, someone directly related to him!
The psychologist asked, “Can you describe him?”
X said, “He was a bit shorter than me, probably about the same age as me, standing together to watch the swallows.”
The psychologist asked, “Did that child have any other characteristics?”
X paused, in his memory, there were two children, standing back to him, on the wooden box, happily watching the little swallows chirp chirp chirp.
The psychologist said, “So, his clothes? Or…”
“He was carrying a backpack,” X said, his memories flowing like a spring in his mind, “A blue backpack. There were… letters, a word on it.”
The psychologist asked, “Can you remember? That word.”
Closing his eyes, X’s mind was filled with the image of that little boy, the little guy carrying a small blue backpack, standing beside him, with fresh and vigorous breath, just beside his arm… within reach.
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