Ceremony

  I walked over to the sofa and saw Gao Cheng still intently focused on the script. I could only lightly clear my throat: "Hey."

  "What's up?" He didn't even lift his head.

  I whispered: "Just now Xu Jianglun called me and said... Du Xiangyuan is dead."

  " Cause of death?"

  "Suicide. The tool was a thin fishing line hidden under the skin of his forearm."

  "Oh." He responded faintly and didn't continue. I couldn't help but ask, puzzled: "How come you don't seem surprised at all?" Only then did he raise his head slightly, looking up at me with a hint of curiosity: "You're surprised?"

  I nodded honestly, but he said: "That's you taking what I say as nothing."

  "Ah?" He really couldn't keep up with his thinking, had he anticipated this before?

  He stated: "When I first mentioned 'psychological heart disease', I listed its symptoms: helplessness, panic is the early manifestation, later hallucinations, betrayal, hatred, and death. They represent a certain stage, Du Xiangyang did so much to say that he was venting his inner fears, but rather that he was holding a ritual, and death is the ultimate."

  "You mean... he never excluded himself and had a mind to die from the very beginning?"

  Gao Cheng pursed his lips: "The inner world of people with mental illnesses has a special kind of cohesion. To you ordinary people, Wu Yan loves Yu Xiuping, and Yu Xiuping loves two men at the same time. In fact, they don't have love in their minds at all, but rather they are convinced that these three people are an integral whole."

  I fell silent because I had been involved in the case and it was inevitable to feel depressed after listening to all this. Especially, innocent children and elderly people became the accompaniment of three mentally ill persons.

  The greatest sorrow of human existence is none other than this.

  "Stop your sorrowful mood. If you have nothing better to do, come over and read this out loud for me."

  A script was stuffed into my hands, and Kao Shirou easily pulled me to sit beside him. He then leaned his head back against the sofa's backrest and closed his eyes.

  I nudged him with my elbow, "Don't you want to know if Du Xiangyuan has revealed the root cause of their illness?"

  "I don't want to." He casually threw out two words, I couldn't help but feel stifled, and was about to throw the script on the coffee table and get up. He suddenly opened his eyes and said nonchalantly: "If you can't hold it in, just say it, my ears are empty anyway."

  Finally, I awkwardly opened my mouth: "Xu Jianglun said..."

  "Get straight to the point."

  He gritted his teeth and continued: "For the past two days, Du Xiangyuan's behavior was extremely unstable on the first day, often screaming wildly in the isolation room, and even several times banging his head against the wall, all of which were stopped by the guards in time. By the second day, he had changed completely, losing all the ferocity of the previous day, and silently staying in the isolation room, not responding to anyone's interrogation. At night, when the police wanted to interrogate him again, they found that he was still handcuffed to the iron railing with one hand, but had no breath left. Cause of death: asphyxiation. A thin line wrapped around his neck, hanging from the iron bar.

  Xu Jianglun is a criminal police officer who was the first to discover this. From his slightly trembling voice just now, it can be heard that this matter has had a great impact on him. It's no wonder, originally he was just an ordinary civil policeman, because of the involvement in the case investigation, later promoted by Zhang Ji to the criminal police brigade, but still a rookie in dealing with such homicide cases.

  Gao Cheng was silent for a moment, then asked: "What's your take on this?"

  "There's nothing to argue about, everything is as expected. Satisfied with what you wanted to say, now it can be read in general."

  I glared at him: "You knew he wanted to die, why didn't you alert the police?"

  He said: "Believe me, death is the best outcome. The law has relative immunity for mentally ill patients, once he is exempted, it will be a disaster."