Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 148

Chapter 148: Buried

Overly Intense

Shen Yiyi listened to the conversation between the two through the glass, holding the materials that Piao Zheng had collected in the past few days.

Zhan Luo, thirty-seven years old, was born into a sports family.

His father was a retired national-level track and field athlete, and his mother had been a gymnast. After the woman had gotten married, she had retired to be a housewife, and the whole family had lived on the father’s salary.

Although they were not rich, the life of a reputable family was quite good. In the eyes of outsiders, the Zhan family was a disciplined and very happy small family.

After the incident, the police had immediately contacted Zhan Luo’s older sister. Through her description, the police had learned that the four children in the Zhan family had never enjoyed family warmth. Their childhood was a cage built of sweat, fear, and shame.

When Zhan Luo was born, his eldest sister had already entered the provincial track and field team to study. They would not see each other for several years. All three girls in the family, without exception, had been arranged by their father to study at a sports school. His second sister was five years older than him and was a top student in the provincial sports school’s archery team. His third sister was not much different in age from him, but she was mostly silent. The sisters’ rooms were always tightly closed, and a crack would only be left when a trophy came home. Every time their father frowned at the dinner table, they and their mother would immediately shut up.

As the only boy in the family, Zhan Luo also had many privileges at the dinner table, such as being able to communicate and joke with his father. Although he had many privileges, his father also had high expectations for him and would not allow him to slack off in the slightest since he was a child. He had learned to swim at four and had practiced track and field at five, but his father had not found a project that Zhan Luo was good at, which had made him annoyed.

A child who grows up in a competitive environment will always be proud of the strong and ashamed of the weak, and will gradually internalize physical strength as the only capital in social exchange. In junior high, Zhan Luo’s height had not shot up, and he had become the shortest boy in the class. To avoid being ostracized, he had begun to imitate and join the group of tall classmates, learning their way of walking, their tone of speech, and participating in bullying female classmates, making lewd jokes, and other gender-specific behaviors.

In his sister’s account, Piao Zheng had learned that Zhan Luo had already shown a tendency toward violence in his adolescence.

During this period, Zhan Luo was often called to the school by his parents because of fighting. But his father had not punished him, because he knew that his son was short and was easily bullied by boys, so a proper counterattack was not a big deal for the parents. He had only given Zhan Luo a verbal education.

Shen Yiyi understood this behavior as a kind of submission to “masculine hegemony.” An individual, by imitating a strong group, seeks to establish their social value. This is also the reason why adolescent boys love to be despicable.

In high school, Zhan Luo’s personality had changed a lot.

He had been bullied by his peers in the sports school, which had led to an injury before the exam, so he had missed the opportunity to be selected for the provincial team. When his father had found out, he had been furious and had cursed him for many days. Zhan Luo, who could not bear it anymore, had gotten into a big fight with his father. He had accidentally broken his father’s ribs and had been in solitary confinement for a long time.

Shen Yiyi guessed that adolescence was the breaking point of Zhan Luo’s psychological structure.

At an age when he looked up to strength, he was trampled underfoot by strength. His social life had not grown according to the standards of “masculine culture,” which had made him an outlier in the group. He had doubts, resistance, and even disgust for his own performance.

A thick stack of materials, including the files sent by Wang Xi, and the works that Zhan Luo had left at the reading group. Shen Yiyi flipped through them curiously. She wanted to know what role his mother had played in Zhan Luo’s growth.

***

His mother’s frame was soft, and her speech was like whistling in the spring. Her waist had never been straight since she had married his father, which had made her look even shorter. His father would always laugh at her for looking like a turnip head.

And he hated the joke about the turnip head, hated that she had accepted it so calmly.

In his memory, there was a glass tank in the corner of the living room with three fish in it, two female and one male. The female fish, one on the left and one on the right, would swim around the male fish. His mother would always sprinkle a large handful of unsoaked feed, watching the male fish dominate the sleep, and would rather have its belly swell up than to let the female fish eat more. It would float on the surface of the water for a few days like this, and in the end, it would die from overeating. His mother would tirelessly clean the bathtub, squat down to change the water, and take the fish out with her fingers, casually throwing it into the trash, and then putting a new male fish in.

Those dead fish had a strong temptation for the six-year-old him.

The dead fish’s belly was so full it was slippery, and its eyes were bulging. Although he did not understand the meaning of the word “temptation” at six, he could feel that uncontrollable impulse. He had secretly rummaged through the trash in the middle of the night while people were asleep, had wrapped the dead fish in a tissue, and had hidden it under his bed. The next day, after he had finished his homework, he would place it on his desk and would stare at it for a long time.

At that time, he did not feel that death was strange. Instead, he felt that the bulging, rotten skin was filled with a faint sweet taste, which had caused a strange and savage stimulation in the corners of his body.

He had also liked many animals in his childhood, such as earthworms, ants, and geckos. He could be fascinated by any living thing. He had envied the order of the animal world and had tried to explain the chaos of this world with the logic of science.

And so, he had often buried the fish that his mother had raised to death in the sandpit. He would bury them and then couldn’t help but dig them up. As he grew older, he had gradually been unable to hold it in, and the greed that was about to burst out of his body. He had started to buy tropical fish with his pocket money. In front of the familiar pit, he had slowly buried the lively little fish with soil.

Effortlessly suffocating the little fish would cause a rusty excitement in his nostrils. He had deliberately slowed down the digging speed to make the sound of the oxygen-deprived flapping last longer. There was some wild cat’s fluff embedded in his fingernails. In the city park in the evening, the sandcastle that his friend had built beside him had become the best cover for him to play with the soil. The struggling jump of the fish’s tail was like the heartbeat in an artery—it was like the sound of his temples throbbing that summer when his father had held his wrist and had chopped the crucian carp’s head with a kitchen knife.

This feeling of suffocation between life and death would not make his knees weak.

Instead, it was a liberating freedom. He would often have a dream after burying a small fish, dreaming of his father’s purple and swollen face buried in a washbasin after he was drunk, the water bubbling, and finally drowning him.

The good times did not last long. The small mound he had buried was accidentally seen by his mother, because a neighbor had revealed that the stray cat that had disappeared downstairs was related to him.

He was used to his mother’s silence, as if she had disappeared in the family. She had not hit him, had not reported him, had not shouted, and had not cried.

She had just quietly looked at the small mounds, her eyes hiding some irreparable crack. She had turned and had walked away in silence. From then on, she had never raised fish again and had confiscated his pocket money.

She had chosen not to let his father intervene, which would have saved a lot of trouble. This had made him feel a sense of fear toward his mother. This silent way of handling things was more confusing to him than his father’s violence. He had begun to be afraid to look directly at his mother’s disgusted gaze—like a dying little fish in a fish tank, which had suddenly become quiet before it died.

In middle school, without pocket money, he could not buy insect specimens, nor could he secretly keep comic books, let alone the tropical fish that made him unable to suppress his impulses. He had become interested in biology and physics and had saved up for a long time to buy a second-hand anatomy atlas, but it had been thrown away by his father as trash. Later, it was his mother who had secretly bought a set of textbooks and had put them in his bookshelf, which had shocked him and had also made his impression of women often confused and torn.

His mother had finally restored his pocket money in his third year of junior high. To express that he had reformed, he would spend all his money on his mother. After school, he would buy his mother canned sugar water, meat and vegetables, and even the braised food she liked.

But she had never scolded or praised him. That gentleness had become a suspended judgment.

He had realized that his mother had not forgiven him.

He had become extremely eager to please, and he had begun to hate this eagerness to please.

Like the girls who talked loudly at school, who shouted and cheered by the basketball court, who dyed their hair, who chewed gum, and who talked about boys. He couldn’t say where that disgust came from. He would even have recurring dreams at night of them with their legs crossed, laughing at him for giving the flowers to the wrong person. Later, he had understood that it was actually a kind of jealousy—he was jealous that they could express their emotions so unrestrainedly, unlike his mother, unlike him, who were always trapped in a restrained self.

From then on, he had treated women as an unsolvable mystery. He had hated their silence, their strength in their tears, their eyes that were clearly vulnerable but disdained to beg for mercy. He had seen all of this as emotional manipulation, the natural disguise of women that his father had claimed—a soft violence that induced male loss of control.

He had told himself: women are the weaker sex, and also natural manipulators. He had resolved to become a strong person, so he had begun to hate his female classmates, a unprecedented hatred rising in his heart, and at the same time, he had hated his mother.

In middle school, he had been protected and treated gently by his biology teacher. The female teacher’s understanding had made him feel a brief sense of light. The teacher had recommended that he participate in a biology competition, but his father had refused. But the teacher had not given up and had insisted on negotiating, and had finally gotten him a chance to try out. But that summer, he had not participated in the end and had instead chosen the track and field training that would please his father. When the teacher had questioned him, he had put on a mocking face and had retorted with disdain. But afterward, he had regretted it and had written in his diary:

“Deep down, he has an unspeakable compassion for those fates that are belittled and defined by the body.”

Even the female teacher who had cared about him, he had never respected.

He had used logic and rules to suppress all doubts, believing in the order of the natural world, the lion as the master, the queen bee without desire. He wanted to be the predator at the top.

—Until he had failed the college entrance examination, and reality had slowly begun to derail.