在好久好久以前

從前他和她是一中女中的王子公主。那是明星高中還明星而不是藝人的年代。沒有太多人追求她，也不是太少，但聽見有他便紛紛退卻了，像開燈的房間看不見燭火。她甚喜歡他性格中堅持到彆扭的部分，比如他學古典音樂，竟根本不聽流行音樂，去KTV也只會唱一首《朋友》。

第一次接吻她早已從大學休學，他在美國念大學，聖誕期間返鄉。她才從精神病房出來，才第一次吞安眠藥，第一次上吊。遠遠地看見他只穿一件薄長袖，冷氣團把白上衣吹餒在他的腰身上，衣衫的皺紋亦有一種笑意。那笑意與從前被裝在過於寬大、僵硬的泥土色制服中的笑亦沒有不同。榕樹下他很自然吻了她。大冷天的，竟然還有鳥在啼，巢巢的葉子中找不到那鳥，彷彿是樹木本身在啼叫。她開始哭，說不行，說他什麼都不知道，說她已經不天真。說了你的事情。他問到那一步了。她想都沒想就說接吻。他又吻了她說他沒關係的。可是她看見他的眼睛裡有個小孩中蠱似地手舞足蹈在扒撕一棵千年白千層的樹皮。

隔天他陪她上臺北會診，他們接了一個十站地鐵之久的吻。有一束光，像一束舞臺燈光像一支倒掛的紫色鬱金香包裹住他們。

後來她不捨得分開，去美國住了數月。他念理工，拿了作品要參加國際科展，科展辦在荷蘭。那是她第一次去荷蘭。在荷蘭一星期，做盡遊客該做的事。印象最深的是安妮·弗蘭克之家。安妮一家躲藏的那書櫃不可思議地矮小，不能想像要阻擋龐然四十二臂的歷史仇恨。折腰踏進去，裡面卻意外敞亮。馬上想到《安妮日記》裡散了一地的豆子和淹在豆裡的彼得。也許豆子海裡褲襠裡的小雞，和安妮一路摸索過去的笑聲。一路上，書裡的句子在腦子裡走馬燈。她才發現他的手一直攔在她頭上，怕她一頭撞上低梁，或者怕梁一頭撞上她。出來之後有個安妮的小青銅雕像，他擺正相機說去拍個照吧。她說不要，說她不要跟安妮·弗蘭克合照。他斂起笑容說他懂了，向她道歉。她說不是他的錯，不是他或她的錯，手指深深穿進他的手指裡面。

他在美東的大學城讀書。他去上課，她就坐在咖啡廳裡看翻譯書寫文章。她沒有學歷，他不像其他人介意，只一直鼓勵她寫。他用的蘋果電腦，她不善用蘋果的中文輸入法，他竟甘心聽她口述，他謄打。又不是什麼了不起的文章。她英文在臺灣還好，丟到美國就顯得破破爛爛。他教她念「中杯」，「Grande」，在露天咖啡座誇飾著嘴型。他的嘴唇粉紅紅，尾音像一個微笑，她無限地望進去，想要溺死在裡面。有時候在大賣場，美國的大賣場出了結帳區總有租DVD的自動機器，那是她第一回看阿莫多瓦《破碎擁抱》，看之前神經兮兮地問他，沒有中文字幕，她一定看不懂。看完之後，女主角死了，男主角瞎了，她哭得眼睛像杏桃；對他說，其實沒有那麼難。他撫摸她的頭，像是在說：是的，親愛的，這一切其實沒有那麼難。但是他們都錯了。

分手之後她也不再準備考美國大學，開始了游離在幻覺幻聽的生活。離他七年？或是八年？不記得了。她去年結婚之前，寫了長長的信給他；解釋在一起的一年裡為什麼她那樣混沌，向他道歉。河河說道歉本是自慰。不是的，高中班上三分之二的同學是醫生，臉書上綠大褂綠口罩外的眼睛，憔悴中有生機。動態裡醫學名詞的拉丁文如異國的蚯蚓。她會想，啊，那就是我素未謀面的故鄉。她的人生被搶走了，被弄壞了，在某一刻就扭曲，歪斜了。

要如何解釋：是的，你吻了我，但我並未吻你。是的，你做了我，但我沒有做。是的，那時，我與你在一起，但我並不在那裡。這一切，要如何解釋，又為什麼要解釋？

那天她跟他說她上臺北補習SAT的時候去找了你。為什麼？她聽見他的聲音裡有釘子、壁癌，和一整棟廢棄的鬼屋。她說因為他根本比不上你。為什麼？她聽見流沙開始吞噬那鬼屋，鬼的尾巴開始嘬束，臉孔在融化。沒有為什麼，她說她就是愛你勝過愛他。一面說她自己也哭了，拿頭臉身體去撞牆。他拉攔著她，沉沉地呐喊，像身體反芻之後的回音，他說了：沒關係，真的沒關係。過幾天洗澡的時候瘀青從烏雲褪成老茶的顏色，一塊一塊在身上足有手掌大，斑斕得像熱帶魚。她心想她是個人人放養其中的魚缸。

那天她上臺北補習SAT的時候去找你。隔著一年？或是兩年？忘記了。你一開頭就問她有男朋友了嗎？她答有。你又問男朋友是誰？她說以前說過的，對面高中那男生。你一臉滿意。當然她後來明白那是要減輕罪惡感。後來的事她沒有對任何人提過，對精神科醫生和心理諮詢師也是兩三年後才講上來。長褲撕掉鈕扣，小褲撕出線頭。雖然也不是第一次。結束之後你開始看電視，憑著耳朵可以知道你又在看新聞，國家有人貪污，有人串供，你正義凜然、法相莊嚴地說起大道理，她靜靜地穿起衣服，靜靜地在你旁邊睡著。她依然不知道小時候發生了什麼。也許她潛意識想重新被汙一次。

他第二次回美國開學那日，說了一句情話給她。她淚不能止，因為那竟是從前你說給她過的。怎麼可能迷信語言的人能得到真愛？送機之後她去買了一百顆普拿疼，不多也不少。那時在台南，被推進奇美，插鼻胃管洗胃。活性炭黑得像瀝青，她像是把一生的黑夜都吐了出來。從成大調來解毒劑，又被送上救護車，高速公路一路啼鳴，從深夜吆喝到白天，直推進台大的重症監護室。她的背可以感到一路上醫院的地板很流利，毫不疙瘩，像一首童詩。身上插滿了管線，紅的紅，綠的綠。嘔吐的時候，心電圖會尖叫，她的上身彈起來，牽動一聲管線，管線連綴的點滴、機器癡癡地動搖。

轉到普通病房，楚楚醫生來看她，她想說話，無關緊要的詞卻像棉花漏出破娃娃：「耳機……走路……鉛筆……」她捏扯自己的脖子和嘴唇，眼淚代替語言流了滿臉。而楚楚還是一如往常對她說：「好，好，很好。」病房外，爸爸大聲重複楚楚的話：「從沒看過她情況這樣糟？」為什麼這個世界的隔音這樣差。

後來他們一個在美國，一個在臺灣，時差將近一個晝夜。視頻聊天貪饞講到他的睡覺時間，道晚安後就開著放著。他道晚安的笑眼，像不善用餐具的小孩子瞇著筷子去揀一顆豆，那筷子的深情。她一面看書一面看他睡覺。他偶爾打呼嚕一聲傳過來，她總像電器被插上電源。她是全世界最幸福的人。

至重一次，他媽媽說了：你配不上我兒子。好幾年以後，聽說他家族有人生病，她馬上想道：伯母，誰家的孩子都會生病。想到這裡馬上覺得自己邪惡，馬上哭出聲。伯母——我可能不配當你們家媳婦，但我是真愛你兒子的。後來也明白爸媽當初是不要他父母知道，第一時間才沒送去成大，她心裡一直有點恨意。

分手後一陣子，他放假回臺灣，送了她喜歡的流行歌手CD給她。那個只聽巴赫莫札特伊薩伊的大男孩，微笑捧著螢光濃妝大人頭的CD。她才第一次驚覺自己造成了如此之大的傷害。

鬧分手的時候也是王子樣，盛大的紅玫瑰一抱一抱送過來。他在美國，請台南的花店老闆寫了字條：失去你我會活不下去。陌生的字跡，嗡嗡浮出他的聲音。她知道他臉皮薄，竟還要在電話裡叮囑這樣的資訊，加倍覺得自己惡。可是來不及了。

她當然記得高中時候他在公眾場合尋找她的目光，四目相接的時刻對她來說就像是嗚嗚如泣的火車在隧道裡找到那個漸強的光，那個出口。在小小的地下室補習，轉頭抽過面巾紙，她一定可以看見他的眼睛——回過頭來，左手邊的河河已經在當醫生，而右手邊的冊冊在美國念博士。她以為自己會跟她們一樣。

那年，那天，你像夏天的鵝絨被，不合時宜地蓋在她身上，感情強烈到兇惡。你說她美，說她才華，對她說與一個美且才的女生「能發生的關係都要發生」。她當然知道那是胡蘭成的句子。她從未覺得自己像張愛玲，好比基督徒不曾覺得自己像耶穌。你清澈的惡意，她頓時間感到加倍赤裸、無所措其手足。

也許她早該明白，就像托爾斯泰描寫當年的俄法戰爭，軍隊棄守莫斯科，撤退時把整個莫斯科城都焚毀了——你也像個兵，在離開她的時候，把不能帶走的東西，全部焚毀了。

“在好久好久以前” first appeared in INK magazine, 2017.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, he and she were the prince and princess of the top high schools. Back then, name-brand schools had just emerged and were not that popular yet. Not a lot of boys were pursuing her, but there were a few. They retreated when they heard she was taken, like it would be hard to find the flame of a candle inside a well-lit room. She really appreciated his persistence, even though his determination sometimes became awkward, like when he learned an instrument and became a devoted fan of classical music, refusing to listen to pop music anymore. Whenever he went to karaoke, the only song he sang was the old-school hit “Friends” by Emil Chau. 

The first time they kissed, she’d already been on leave from her university for a while. He was back home from America for the winter holidays; she had just checked out from the psychiatric hospital. This was after her first attempts at swallowing sleeping pills or hanging herself. When they met, she saw him from a distance in only a thin long-sleeve shirt. The cold wind blew his shirt against his torso, and the wrinkles on his clothes looked like they were smiling––that smile reminded her of the crease in his wide, stiff, soil-colored high school uniform. 

Under the banyan tree, he gave her the kiss. Birds were still chirping despite the cold, but they couldn’t see them amid the nested leaves, so it appeared as though the tree was chirping. She began to cry and said no, he knew nothing, and that she was no longer innocent. She talked about you; he asked how far she had gone. She replied without hesitating that you had kissed her. He kissed her again and said there was nothing wrong with that. However, she saw in his eyes a child teasing her, waving her arms, crawling and tearing down the bark of a white, thousand-year-old tea tree. 

The following day, he went with her to her follow-up doctor’s appointment in Taipei. They kissed in the subway for ten stops. There was an aura of light around them, as though they were on stage or enfolded in an upside-down purple tulip. 

She couldn’t bear to part from him, so she spent several months living in the U.S. He was studying science and readying his work for an international exhibition in the Netherlands. That was her first time visiting the Netherlands. In a week, they did everything tourists do in the city. What left the deepest impression on her was Anne Frank House. The bookshelves that Anne’s family hid behind were incredibly small, and it was hard for her to imagine how they could shield them from a grand, forty-two-armed historical hatred. She had to stoop to enter, and inside, it was brighter than she expected. She thought about the story of the beans in The Diary of a Young Girl, imagining the scattered beans on the floor and Peter drowning in them. For a little bit she imagined Peter’s little chick hiding near his crotch, in the sea of beans. She imagined Anne’s laughter as Peter flailed in the beans. 

As she made her way through the museum, sentences from the diary ran in her head as if displayed on a marquee. She realized that his arms were always above her head, preventing her from bumping into any low beams, or preventing the low beams from bumping into her. When they came out of the museum, they saw Anne’s tiny bronze statue. He took out his camera and asked her to take a picture with it. She refused, unwilling to take a photo with Anne Frank. He forced a smile and said he understood and apologized. She said it was not his fault, not anyone’s fault. She simply let her fingers be enclosed in his. 

He was studying on the East Coast. Whenever he went to class, she would sit in a coffee shop, reading translated books and writing articles. She didn’t have a college diploma, but unlike others, he didn’t mind. He encouraged her to keep writing. He had an Apple laptop, on which she was not used to typing in Chinese, so he simply let her narrate and he would type the story out for her. These works were rather mediocre. Her English had been average back in Taiwan, but in America, she felt inferior. He taught her how to pronounce grande to mean “medium,” exaggerating his enunciation with his mouth. His lips were pink, and the ending of the word gave him a smile. As she looked at him, she felt like drowning inside his lips. 

Inside American megastores, sometimes there were DVD rental machines by the checkout counters. That was how she ended up watching Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces for the first time. Before the movie started, she’d panicked and told him she wouldn’t be able to understand anything since there weren’t Mandarin subtitles. After watching it, having seen the female character die and the male character go blind, she cried so much her eyes were like apricots. Things are actually not that hard, she said to him. He stroked her head, as though agreeing, Yes, my dear, it’s not that difficult. But they were both wrong. 

After they broke up, she decided not to apply to universities in the U.S. She began drifting back and forth between illusion and reality. Was this seven years ago? Or eight years? She couldn’t remember anymore. Before getting married last year, she wrote a long letter to him, explaining why she’d been in such chaos when they were still together. She apologized. Her friend said apologies are masturbation. No, they’re not. 

From her senior high school class, two-thirds of the students had become doctors. Their Facebook profiles showed their long green robes and their eyes peeking out above green surgical masks, haggard yet vibrant. The medical terms in Latin were like exotic earthworms. She would think, Ah, that’s a world I never had the chance to know. Her life had been snatched away, destroyed, became crooked. She had been led astray. 

How to explain? Yes, you kissed me, but I didn’t kiss you back. Yes, you did it to me, but I didn’t do it back. Yes, I was with you at the time, but I wasn’t really there. How do I explain everything, and why should I even have to? 

One day, back then, she’d told her boyfriend that she visited you whenever she went to take her SAT classes in Taipei. Why? She heard rusty nails, decay, and an abandoned haunted house in his voice. She told him that there was nobody who could replace you. Why? She heard quicksand starting to swallow that haunted house, the tail of the ghost tightening up, its face melting. There was no reason why. She said she simply loved you more than she loved him. As she spoke, she began to cry, trying to hit her head and face, slamming her body against the wall. He tried to pull her back, his guttural shouts the echoes of a retching body. He told her, It’s alright. It’s really alright. A few days later, the color of the bruises turned from black clouds to overly brewed tea. Patches of them were the size of a palm, spotted and speckled like tropical fish. She thought of herself as an aquarium, one that she let anyone fill with fish as they pleased. 

She’d gone to you another time when she went up to Taipei for her SAT classes again. Was it a year later? Or two years? She forgot. Once you saw her, you asked if she had a boyfriend. She said yes. You asked who her boyfriend was. She said she mentioned him before, the guy who studied at the high school right across from hers. Your face was full of satisfaction. She realized later that you’d asked about her boyfriend to relieve your sense of guilt. What happened after that, she never mentioned to anyone else. It took two or three years for her to actually talk about it with her psychologist and therapist. The buttons were torn from her pants, threads pulled from her underwear. It was not the first time, though. After you finished, you watched TV. From a distance, she could tell you were watching the news again. There was corruption and conspiracy in the country; you became emboldened in your sense of justice, solemnly lecturing about morals. As for her, she quietly put on her clothes and fell asleep next to you. She still didn’t understand what had happened to her when she was younger. Maybe subconsciously, she wanted to be contaminated again. 

The second time he went back to the U.S. for school, he said something romantic to her as they parted. She couldn’t stop her tears because it was something you used to say to her. How was it possible for the prince and the demon to speak the same language from the same country? The language of the kingdom of love? How could someone who was superstitious about language find true love? 

After sending him to the airport, she bought a hundred capsules of Panadol, no more no less. She was living in Tainan then, and ended up wheeled into Chi-Mei Medical Center so a nasogastric tube could be inserted to pump her stomach. The activated carbon was black like asphalt, and it was as though she had vomited all the dark nights of her life out of her. They received the antidote from Cheng-Kung University and sent her on another ambulance, which wailed the whole ride on the highway to Taipei. The vehicle shrieked from deep night to the break of day. They wheeled her straight into the ICU at National Taiwan University Hospital. On her back, she could feel the floor of the hospital glide under her without a single bump, smooth as children’s poetry. She had tubes all over her body, red ones and green ones. When she vomited, the ECG would scream, her body would convulse, trembling with all of the tubes, the drips, and the machines near her. 

After she was relocated to the regular ward, Doctor Chu came to visit her. She wanted to speak, but all of the unimportant words were like cotton stuffing leaking out of a damaged stuffed animal, “Earphones. . . walking. . . pencils. . . .” She pinched and pulled her neck and lips. Her tears replaced spoken language and streaked all over her face. Doctor Chu, as usual, told her, “Good, good, very good.” Outside of the ward, Papa repeated Chu’s words loudly. “You’ve never seen her in such bad condition?” Why was there always such bad soundproofing everywhere? 

Later on, one of them was in the U.S. and the other in Taiwan. There was a half a day of time difference between them. They always video chatted until his bedtime. After saying good night, he would leave his camera on. The way he said good night to her was like a child who wasn’t good at using chopsticks, squinting his eyes to pick up a bean. Such emotion in that concentration. She would read her books and watch him sleep. Occasionally, he would snore and the sound would come to her side. She felt like an electric appliance plugged into a socket. She was the happiest person in the world. 

One time, his mother told her, “You’re not a match for my son.” Many years later, she heard someone in his family fell deeply ill. She thought, Auntie, maybe I’m not the right person to become your daughter-in-law, but I do really love your son. She realized much later that her parents hadn’t wanted his parents to know what had happened to her, and that’s why they didn’t send her directly to the hospital at Cheng-Kung University where his parents worked. She resented it to this day. 

After their breakup, he took a vacation back in Taiwan and gave her a CD of her favorite pop singer. He was the kind of boy who only listened to Bach, Mozart, and Ysaÿe. He smiled and showed her the CD with a woman’s face on it, bright and fully made up. She was shocked to realize how much damage she had done to him by this point. 

Even when they fought ferociously, he still behaved like a prince and sent bouquets of red roses to her. He was in the U.S. at the time, and he would ask the owner of a floral shop in Taiwan to write short notes for him: I wouldn’t be able to live if I lost you. Even in the unfamiliar handwriting, she could sense his voice floating out and humming those words. She knew he was easily embarrassed, and thinking about how he had to request such a note over the phone, she resented herself. But it was too late. 

She still remembered his gaze, searching for her in a sea of people when they used to meet up back in high school. The moment their eyes met, it was as though the sobbing train in the tunnel had finally found the approaching light. That exit. When they took classes in the cram school down in the basement, she would turn to grab a tissue paper, and she would meet his gaze. Thinking back to it now, she remembered that He-He who sat next to her had become a doctor, and Tse-Tse on the right had gone to the U.S. for a PhD program. She had thought she would turn out just like them. 

That year, that day, you were like a duvet covering her body, but not at the right time. The emotions were so strong that they became vicious. You told her she was beautiful, that she was intelligent, and that you needed to “make everything happen” with a girl like her. Beautiful and intelligent. Of course, she knew it was a sentence from Hu Lancheng, the first husband of Eileen Chang. Yet she never thought of herself as Eileen Chang, just like how Christians wouldn’t believe themselves to be Jesus. She felt especially naked and helpless under your pure evil. Perhaps she should have understood that it would happen like how Tolstoy described the French invasion of Russia: the army abandoned Moscow, and while retreating, they burned down the entire city. And you, you were like a soldier. When you left her, you burned everything that you couldn’t take with you.