Chapter 44: “Safe Travels” Part 1

“Here, take it back. Safe travels.”

Kong Liyuan stepped out of the hospital and recalled those words once more. A tide of traffic and crowds surged in from all sides. Li Qiao leaned against a pickup truck, watching her with a blurred face full of worry.

Just moments ago, the young woman had fainted again from exhaustion. A blonde nurse stood beside her, her face equally indistinct, and calmly informed Kong Liyuan, “This lady’s mother will be here soon.”

Kong Liyuan bowed her head slightly and murmured her thanks. Strands of hair, still sticky with blood, hung down her neck. She probably looked like a horror flick extra right now, but she no longer cared about any of that.

The hospital’s lighting always evoked a meticulously staged crime scene. Kong Liyuan sat in the stark white glow of the ward, her waist and abdomen wrapped in layers of blood-soaked gauze. Everything before her eyes blazed like a blinding white flame, vicious tongues of fire licking at her vision and reducing it all to the hazy void after an explosion.

She knew this sensation all too well, but it didn’t hurt. She simply gazed calmly at the young woman lying on the hospital bed. Was this the last thing she would say to her?

The young woman’s beautiful hazel eyes were hidden beneath her lids. Her usually vibrant and gentle face had turned pale and shadowed from severe blood loss, the skin beneath her eyes tinged with a sickly grayish red.

Kong Liyuan stared at this youthful, innocent face on the bed, wishing she could etch it more deeply and clearly into her memory.

She released her hand from where it pressed against the wound on her abdomen. Her fingers trembled uncontrollably, but she ignored it coldly, reaching out instead to gently clasp the young woman’s hand.

The loose hospital gown draped over the young woman’s slender, blood-drained frame like a cold, pristine shroud. The wrist in her grasp felt piercingly chill, as if all the warmth had been utterly drained from her.

The wound on the nameless finger’s knuckle was fully wrapped in gauze, with faint traces of blood seeping through.

Kong Liyuan watched for a long time. When she noticed the blood slowly spreading beneath the bandage, a sudden realization hit her: her grip was too tight. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal.

So she gently placed the hand back on the bed.

When she let go, the red stain beneath the gauze stopped spreading. The abstract white blaze before her eyes dulled her perception.

She wasn’t her—she was someone who would feel pain.

“Will you remember me?”

Kong Liyuan recalled saying those words, though she wasn’t entirely sure if they had come from her own mouth. After dawn broke, she dragged her bloodstained, tattered clothes out of the hospital. Amid the bustling crowds, she spotted Li Qiao.

Li Qiao stood in the roaring wind, waving enthusiastically at her. Kong Liyuan heard her shout her name loudly.

“Zoe!”

In that instant, the wind hollowed out her body, turning it into a stark, silent tunnel that whistled emptily through her.

She walked steadily into the crimson dawn, the memory of that person’s blood-warm breath still lingering on her neck—scalding hot and slick, like a dense, unyielding entanglement unto death.

Dawn climbed step by step, stretching her blurred shadow into a lingering trail of blood. In future dawns like this, she would always vaguely think of that bloodline, silky and indelible: one end at the wound on her waist and abdomen, the other at the scar on that woman’s nameless finger knuckle.

Now, with each slow step, her wounds seemed to knit closed, giving her an almost out-of-body sensation—as if she weren’t truly the one who had endured this mad journey.

She climbed into the rusty old red pickup truck and fished out a crumpled, flattened pack of cigarettes from her clothes. Before the crash, she vaguely remembered five or six left inside. After the crash, for this pack to still be in the ragged pocket of her torn shirt—right over her wounded waist—was nothing short of a miracle.

Only one remained: wrinkled, filthy, and stained with unidentified blood. It could have been hers, or the young woman’s.

But it didn’t matter.

She lacked the strength to even lift her hand to light it. She patted herself down and realized she had no lighter on her.

Right—she dredged the memory from her scorched, foggy mind.

“I pawned the lighter.”

That was her first words to Li Qiao, her voice rasping like a female ghost emerging from flames.

“What?!” Li Qiao nearly leaped out of the truck. Her voice was close yet seemed to drift from afar.

“Fuck! That lighter was expensive! You just casually pawned it off like that? Pawned it for what? Tell me!”

Kong Liyuan kept her eyes downcast, the blood-tinged cigarette still clenched between her lips. She gave a weary laugh. “For a swimsuit. I’ll pay you back tenfold when we get home.”

Li Qiao fell silent, probably taking in the crusty, dried bloodstains on her clothes and deciding to let it slide. She sighed. “Fine, whatever. Oh, by the way, those guys you told me about? They’ve already been hauled to the police station. The lawyer’s on her way. Damn, even just those few racked up a list of charges, and with the assault this time, they won’t see daylight for years.

“That lawyer’s a pro at cases like this. I’ll have her get in touch with the victim later and settle the score properly. Though when they got nabbed, they were already beat to hell—apparently wiped out on their motorcycles…”

Li Qiao laid out the fate of those blonde thugs with clear precision, then glanced at Kong Liyuan, who lounged listlessly against the window without much reaction.

Suddenly, Li Qiao recalled the late-night call she’d received from a payphone. Kong Liyuan’s voice had been eerily calm.

“Li Qiao, I need a favor.”

So she’d hustled through the night to sort things out, then rushed to the hospital entrance, only to pick up Kong Liyuan covered in blood. She’d anticipated this spur-of-the-moment trip would be wild, but not that it would end in such earth-shattering drama.

If she’d known it would turn out like this, would she have tried to stop Kong Liyuan? Probably not. As a bystander, Li Qiao felt pretty thrilled about it.

Even if the Kong Liyuan now—cigarette dangling from her lips, steeped in the crimson dawn—looked more worn down than ever, like the protagonist of some apocalypse flick.

But she found it refreshing. Charismatic, even.

Click. The lighter snapped open. A bright red flame danced before her eyes.

It flickered in Kong Liyuan’s dark gaze, like a slowly swirling vortex of blood.

The flame’s glow licked across her dejected yet strikingly beautiful face. Amid the gusting wind, it strained to reach the bloodstained lock of black hair.

The light seemed to melt in an instant, dripping down to her brow bone. She tilted her head slightly. Her long black hair, tousled by the wind, scattered in the scarlet glow on the horizon.

Blood-smeared lips clamped the thin, filthy cigarette as it neared the leaping flame. Her lowered lashes quivered faintly.

The cigarette lit. In the brightening dawn, it burned away the hazy glare, igniting a vivid red ember.

Kong Liyuan leaned back in the seat and casually smoothed her wind-messed hair. She bit down on the menthol bead. A faint sweet aroma rode the smoke through her lungs, coursing through her battered body before she exhaled it slowly.

Like a cloying kiss seeping into her bones.

“After all that chaos to reach the end, you couldn’t stay conscious long enough to say a proper goodbye?”

Li Qiao lit one for herself and asked amid the drifting smoke.

“What should you even say in a goodbye?” Kong Liyuan exhaled a thin wisp of pale mist. No young woman would ever again lean in innocently to steal her first puff.

It was a question she had never quite grasped.

“Something like ‘see you later,’ maybe? Or hug it out, both of you covered in wounds. Say ‘let’s meet again sometime.’ Or ‘I’m so glad you were with me on this journey.’ Or just stare into each other’s eyes in silence, then cut to black with ‘The End’ on screen…”

Kong Liyuan laughed. The smoke hung in the fading dawn like a dream going up in flames all around them.

“So that’s a goodbye?” She bit down on the cigarette, laughing hazily amid the pain that threatened to dissolve her into a puddle of blood.

“Pretty much. Don’t all those happy-ending movies wrap up like that?” Li Qiao drawled lazily.

“Then she’s already said goodbye to me.” Kong Liyuan said softly.

“How so?” Li Qiao turned to scrutinize her expression.

But Kong Liyuan’s face was expressionless, and she said nothing more, leaving Li Qiao unable to pry further.

Li Qiao sighed again and tried a different tack. “So was she one of those overly friendly, naive types you can’t stand?”

Kong Liyuan didn’t deny it, though her response was slow. “Yes.”

“Why did she feel different to you?”

Yeah, why was she different? Why had it taken a full three days to finally reach Los Angeles?

Kong Liyuan asked herself the same question. Lost in a daze, she recalled everything she had experienced over these past three days. Those fragments played in her mind like scenes from an edited film.

~~~

She had crashed into this young woman’s car and seen the California lupine on the passenger seat. She had encountered a Down Syndrome child on the road and watched a loving couple shout “I love you” amid swirling snowflakes in a California night. There had been a car accident, tumbling down toward jagged cliffs…

And even before that.

Kong Liyuan sat indifferently in a car wrapped tightly in darkness, as if dissociated from herself. She calmly watched her reflection in the rearview mirror. The car windows were pitch black, the interior pitch black, her clothes pitch black—black filled everything.

Yet what enveloped her vision was still that hazy white flame that would never fade from her life, rising nearly to her throat.

The scenery outside blurred like an overexposed photograph. Kong Liyuan couldn’t make out how many shadows slipped past her eyes. But she had no desire to see clearly.

Li Qiao, dressed in a neatly pressed suit and wearing a pair of prim gold-rimmed glasses, smiled from the front seat.

“Long time no see, Zoe.”

She nodded, offering her usual weary smile. “Long time no see.”

Li Qiao stared at her through the rearview mirror for a moment, returned the smile, and then said, “I heard from folks back home that you just wrapped a movie. No wonder you look a little different from last year. Still in character?”

“Do I? I don’t think so.”

“Can you tell me about the role?”

“Her name is Li Yi.”

Mentioning the name of the person whose life she had once painstakingly entered filled Kong Liyuan with a restless agitation that threatened to burst through everything, shattering the blank, ashen voids into bursts of red light.

“What kind of person is she?”

Kong Liyuan gripped her arms tightly. She knew Li Qiao was trying to help her, so she calmly played along. “She’s probably a somewhat unhinged woman. Nothing good ever happens to the people she meets, and she’s no saint herself.

“But she’s not really Li Yi. She just killed Li Yi and took her place.”

“Do you like her?” Li Qiao’s questions always carried a gentle tone.

“I remember you telling me more than once that, compared to those vibrant lives wrapped in love, you prefer appreciating the deaths or fades of lives in films. So I thought this role of Li Yi might give you some deeper insights.”

Kong Liyuan closed her eyes and smiled faintly, offering no opinion on the matter.

Li Qiao obligingly fell silent, asking no more.

In these days teetering on the edge, Kong Liyuan felt an unnatural exhaustion. She was always exerting every effort to suppress her restlessness and unease. So in this pitch-black car, amid the hazy white flames surrounding everything, she finally drifted into an uneasy sleep.

It wasn’t true sleep, more like floating after taking medication. Her body felt heavy, but her consciousness drifted lightly, suspended in the air. It was as if countless writhing tentacles sprouted from her, extending outward, groping.

The tentacles emerging from her body seemed omnipotent, yet as ruined and thin as everything she had ever received in her life. She could never control their growth or spread, nor turn them into something good.

She wondered if she was the only one like this in the world—a barren heart buried in a handful of bluish-black ash, forever unable to grow into something better.

When she woke again, the car interior was still shrouded in darkness. Kong Liyuan let it submerge her calmly; any scenes flashing by outside meant nothing to her.

The car had pulled over to the roadside and stopped moving forward. Li Qiao was no longer inside. Kong Liyuan rested her head against the car window, which resembled a pool of black water, and waited quietly. First, she heard a song, clear and distinct.

The swaying melody made the air inside the car quiver and blur. A man’s hazy, clamorous voice hummed:

“California Dreamin'”

After what felt like an endlessly long ten seconds or so, a convertible slowly pulled up alongside her car on the right. The first thing she saw was a bouquet of orange-red California lupine.

The sounds around her repeated endlessly, always that same lyric drifting clearly from the neighboring car.

Kong Liyuan closed her eyes again, but amid the noisy male voice, she heard a clear, soft feminine voice.

It seemed to be humming along with the song, crisp and bright, standing out sharply in the empty, quiet gas station.

Kong Liyuan lifted her eyelids faintly and saw a slender, pale wrist resting on the door of the white convertible, tapping lightly to the rhythm.

The gas station was nearly deserted, as if theirs were the only two cars there.

The woman in the convertible didn’t rush to get out. She seemed content to linger for those extra few dozen seconds, just to finish the song.

The feminine voice hummed along with the car’s speakers on “And the sky is grey,” then paused briefly.

That pause drew Kong Liyuan’s attention.

She looked over and vaguely made out a woman in the driver’s seat. When the lyric came again, the woman’s humming changed “grey” to “gold.”

A single light word turned the sky’s gray tones to gold.

It wasn’t that Kong Liyuan wanted to remember; the song looped only those few lines repeatedly.

As “California Dreamin'” floated into her ears once more, she heard the bright voice laugh in satisfaction.

Then her vision sharpened, and she saw the woman use that slender white wrist to deftly push open the door and leap out of the convertible.

~~~