I SPENT A LONG TIME WRITING my confessions but the leadership always retorted they were not detailed enough, so I had to continue. I came to believe that I would spend the rest of my life confessing. One day, Chen Qingyang wrote a confession and handed it to the people’s police without letting me look at it. I was never asked to write another word. Not only that, but our public criticism sessions ended. Not only that, but Chen Qingyang began to grow distant. After some time of feeling not much of anything, I returned to Beijing by myself. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what she had written.
When I departed from Yunnan, I had lost everything: my gun, my knife, my tools. The only thing I had more of were the files in my bulging envelope of shame. For the rest of my life, wherever I would go, people would know that I was a pervert. The only upside was that I got to return to the city before other people. But it wasn’t much of an upside since I still had to serve in the countryside around the capital.
When I first went to Yunnan, I brought a set of tools with me including vices and clamps, and a full watch repair kit. When I was living by Old Man Liu’s, I used them to fix people’s watches. In the wilderness, there were occasionally horse-herding vagabonds that passed through. Some of them wanted me to appraise smuggled watches. Whatever I said they were worth, that was what they were worth. Of course, my service wasn’t free. I had plenty of work to do in the mountain. Had I not come down from there, I’d have tens of thousands of yuan by now.
As for the double-barreled hunting rifle, it was quite a treasure. The locals were used to seeing carbines and muskets, but they had never seen a thing like that. The barrel was so thick and there were two of them. It was easy for me to scare people with it. Without it, we would have been robbed constantly. Me, and especially Old Man Liu, they would not have robbed. But they probably would have taken Chen Qingyang. As for my knife, it was always attached to a leather belt. The leather belt was usually around Chen Qingyang’s waist. She wore it even when she slept and fucked because she thought it made her look badass. To think of it, it should really be considered her knife. But as I mentioned, the people’s police station took the gun and the knife. I left my tools up in the mountain by Old Man Liu’s before returning to the farm. Had things taken a turn for the worse, I could have gone back. But when I left for Beijing, I was in such a rush that I didn’t get a chance to retrieve them. So, I became destitute.
In the hotel, I said to Chen Qingyang that I could not figure out for the life of me what she had written in that final confession. She said that she couldn’t tell me yet, not until we parted ways. The next day she would be returning to Shanghai. She asked me to go with her to the train station.
Chen Qingyang and I were different in every way. After sunrise, she took a cold shower (the hot water wasn’t running), and began to dress. From her coat down to her panties, she was a sweetly scented lady. I, on the other hand, looked like a hillbilly hooligan from head to toe. No wonder they exonerated her but not me. That is to say, her broken hymen had healed while I never grew the damn thing in the first place. Furthermore, I was guilty of abetting a crime. We had made many mistakes together but since she didn’t admit they were crimes, it was all on me.
We paid the bill in the hotel lobby and exited to the street. It occurred to me, the confession she had turned in must have been obscene. The people who read those things had hearts of stone. How dirty had it been if even they couldn’t stand reading it? Chen Qingyang said there was nothing special in it, only her one true crime.
The one true crime she referred to was what had happened on the road to Qingping. She was hanging across my shoulder with her tube skirt wrapped tightly around her legs and her hair dangling down to my waist. White clouds drifted across the sky. We were the only two people around. I had just spanked her twice, so hard that the blistering pain was only fading slowly. After spanking her, I had cleared my head and focused on the hike.
Chen Qingyang said, in that moment, her body had gone limp from exhaustion. As she hung on my shoulder, she felt at one with the vines, the trees, and all living things. She had not wanted to care about anything else, ever again. In that moment she forgot everything. In that moment, she had fallen in love with me and had known there was no going back.
At the train station, Chen Qingyang said, when she turned in the confession, the colonel read it right away. His face turned as red as your little monk. After that, everyone who read the confession turned as red as little monks. The people’s police station tracked her down to ask her to rewrite it. She said, but it’s the truth, not one word can be changed. They had no choice but to include it in our files.
Chen Qingyang went on saying, admitting what she admitted was like admitting everything. At the people’s police station, they showed her other people’s confessions, hoping she would realize that no one had ever written one like hers. But she insisted on her version. She said, the reason she saved this confession for the end was because it was worse than anything else she had ever done. In the past, she had confessed to opening and closing her legs. But the real reason she did those things was because she enjoyed it. Doing something and enjoying it were different. The first crime deserved a criticism session. The second deserved quartering and death by a thousand cuts. No one had the right to quarter us, so they had to let us go.…
After finally telling me this story, her train departed. I never saw her again.