threadbare [4/4]
MASSIVE WARNING What you are about to read touches upon very sensitive, sometimes triggering topics. Please proceed with caution and only do so if you are okay with voluntarily exposing yourself to descriptive molestation of a minor, rape, violence, suicide, and severe mental illness. Thank you.
Yifan had to look away when tears pooled in Jiaqi’s eyes and she covered her mouth with a weak hand. “Why... why would you let him stay with you?” she said, her voice cracking. “After what he did... I thought you were smarter than this.”
“I gave him the benefit of a doubt,” Yifan said. “I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could get through to him. I thought he was actually willing to change, to fix himself... I was wrong. I know that now.”
“You have to report him, once and for all,” Jiaqi said, quickly wiping away the tears that fell from the corners of her eyes. “What he did to you in your office was bad enough, but it’s gone too far now. He raped you, Yifan --”
“I understand that,” Yifan said. “And... I’ll report him, eventually, I just want to try one more time to get through to him because it won’t help him any to spend the rest of his life in prison.”
Jiaqi scoffed incredulously. “Really, Yifan? Why do you feel any sympathy or remorse for him? He’s evil itself, anyone with two eyes and a functioning brain can see that --”
“I always told myself that people are entitled to three chances... he’s just gone through his second. I also promised myself that I wouldn’t stop until I either triggered a change in someone or realized the situation was hopeless, and this situation is neither of those. I promise you, even if his last chance runs out tonight, I’ll report him once I’m done.”
“You’re so damn stubborn,” Jiaqi said, shaking her head. “What if he ends up killing you? You know he’s deranged enough to do it.”
“He won’t,” Yifan said, and Jiaqi groaned in indignation. “I know he won’t, because he knows that if he tries anything, I’ll call the police. He’s scared to death of the police. That alone is enough to keep him in line.”
“You say that as if he were in line to begin with,” Jiaqi commented snidely.
Yifan glanced at the clock; it was an hour past the clinic’s closing and getting late. “We should probably get going. He just roams the city while I’m here, so I need to pick him up and get him home before it gets too dark out.”
“Sometimes, I wish I could care about people as much as you do,” Jiaqi said, and Yifan gave her a crooked smile. “Right now isn’t one of those times.” With that, she left Yifan’s office to collect her things.
“Make sure to lock everything up before you leave,” Yifan said as he walked past her office, and she grunted back an affirmation before he boarded the elevator and rode it down to the lobby.
“You’ve reached the phone of Huang Zitao. Sorry I couldn’t get to the phone, but leave your name and number and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”
Yifan huffed as the call rang out to voicemail for the eighth time. Zitao was probably upset that things hadn’t gone his way the night before, but he knew better than to ignore Yifan’s calls. Yifan didn’t bother to leave another message reprimanding Zitao for not answering the phone and instead continued to circle around downtown, keeping an eye out for Zitao.
Yifan was just about to tuck away his patient evaluations and call it a night when he heard a knock at his door.
He hadn’t spent long after his final call to Zitao’s phone looking for him. Yifan figured that Zitao, discouraged and unwanted in the way he desired to be wanted, had simply gone back to Shenzhen. The notion of Zitao voluntarily getting as far away from him as possible surprisingly pleased Yifan, and he went right home to quietly celebrate his return to normalcy.
This is why he was both shocked and disappointed to see Zitao when he gazed through the peephole.
“Why didn’t you answer your phone when I called you?” Yifan asked as he opened the door.
“My battery died,” Zitao replied, brushing past Yifan as he walked inside. “I know my way back to your apartment. You don’t have to pick me up like I’m your child.”
“You know that I only do it because you’re scared to travel alone after dark,” Yifan said, shutting the door.
Zitao shrugged. “It’s not so bad anymore,” he said, and then he disappeared into his bedroom.
Yifan didn’t have the energy to question it further. He, too, resigned to his bedroom and quickly fell asleep.
“Shocking news out of Guangzhou this morning, where police are investigating what appears to be a murder. It happened overnight in an alleyway just outside of Yuexiu District, the body disposed of in a dumpster belonging to a nearby restaurant. CCTV’s Wan Xiezhou interviewed a restaurant employee at the scene.”
“I come in early every morning to clean out the trash before the cooks come in. I came in today at about five o’clock, and I was dragging out the trash when I saw what looked like blood dripping down the outside of the dumpster... not out of the dumpster, but on it, like something bloody was put inside, but in a messy sort of way. I was afraid to look, but I opened it anyway... that’s when I saw the girl laying in there, throat slit so severely I could see her spine. God, it was so frightening, I’m shaking just thinking about it again.”
“A coroner on the scene told Wan Xiezhou that the body seemed to have been there for at least seven hours before it was found, immediately absolving the restaurant employee of any involvement. The victim’s name has not yet been released, but we’ve been told that the victim was a female, aged between nineteen and twenty-two years old. We’ll keep you updated with more details as they come in.”
Yifan was catatonic after the call came in, confirming his fears. When he heard the news initially, he felt his stomach roil itself into knots -- Jiaqi was known to walk home from work at night, and she lived just a few blocks away from where the body was found. He hoped and hoped that it wasn’t her, all the while praying for the family of the deceased girl, until Jiaqi’s best friend from work called Yifan in hysterics.
As he sat there, staring into space, wanting to cry but unable to, he found himself doing math. The restaurant employee came in at five that morning. It took maybe fifteen minutes to half an hour for him to gather up the trash, throw it all into a bigger bag for easier disposal, and maybe three minutes to bring it outside. That would make it eighteen minutes after five when he came upon Jiaqi’s corpse.
The coroner said the body had been there for at least seven hours prior to its discovery. Seven hours before 5:18 was 10:18. Yifan had gotten home at 9:50, got into the shower at 9:55, went over paperwork from 10:15 to 10:45, brushed his teeth from 10:46 to 10:48, was just about to get into bed at 10:50, and then Zitao arrived.
Yifan knew it took about fifteen minutes driving to get to the restaurant outside which Jiaqi lay dead from his apartment. If he were to walk there, it would take him maybe forty-five minutes at most. The bus stop closest to the restaurant was about two minutes away, and depending on what time he got there, the bus took between three and ten minutes to arrive. The bus ride, all twenty-two stops between the restaurant and the bus stop closest to Yifan’s apartment included, would take about twenty-five minutes. From there, it would be about a five-minute walk to the apartment, plus another minute in the elevator and walking up to his doorway.
10:18, plus thirty-eight to forty-three minutes, made 10:56 to 11:01.
“What if he kills you? You know he’s deranged enough to do it.”
“Did you hear about that murder?” Zitao asked.
Yifan looked up at him. “Yes.”
“It sounds absolutely horrifying,” Zitao said with a shudder. “I couldn’t imagine being the man that found her.”
“Do you know who it is?” Yifan asked.
“Who, the dead girl?” Zitao replied.
Yifan tried not to flinch at Zitao’s casualness. “Yes. It’s Jiaqi.”
“Oh no,” Zitao said, but the infliction in his voice didn’t match his expression. “That’s horrible. I’m so sorry.” Zitao shook his head. “I should have known, since you’re home and you look drained... it must be hard to believe.”
“Did you do it?”
Zitao, who had started to walk away, stopped in mid-step. “What?”
“Did you kill her?”
“Of course not,” Zitao said with a laugh, refusing to turn and face him. “I wouldn’t do something like that. I’m crazy but not that crazy...”
“Tell me the truth, or I’m calling the police,” Yifan said evenly, and Zitao instantly turned to look at him, a panicked look on his face. “I mean it this time.”
“I’m telling you the truth! I didn’t -- how could I even have done something like that?”
Zitao fell to the ground as Yifan pushed past him to the guest bedroom that Zitao called his own. He chased after Yifan, hoping to be able to shut the door before Yifan could reach it. It was a lost cause on Zitao’s behalf; Yifan walked with large strides right into the room and immediately began searching.
“What are you looking for?” Zitao asked. “I don’t have anything that you would possibly want.”
“Where are the clothes you wore last night?” Yifan asked as he dug through piles of Zitao’s clothes.
“They’re hanging on the line outside my window. I washed them while you were asleep. You know I wash my clothes every night before I go to bed,” Zitao said.
Yifan slammed his hands down in frustration. He was hoping to find a hint, anything, on Zitao’s clothes that would pin him to Jiaqi’s murder. Now, that hope was lost.
“Where’s the knife?”
“I don’t have a knife! I never have and I never will,” Zitao said.
“Give me the goddamn knife!”
Zitao startled, eyes wide. “I already told you, I have no knife to give you.”
“That’s it,” Yifan said, storming out of the room. “You’re done for. You’re a sick bastard, and I’m done giving you chances. You’ve crossed the line and, trust me, you’re not coming back from this one.” He threw on a jacket and his shoes, and then he was gone.
Yifan was waiting for the police officers to assemble their armor and weapons when his phone rang. The police captain beside him glanced at the screen and muttered, “Don’t answer it. Just let it ring through and see if he leaves a voicemail.”
Sure enough, just moments later his phone chimed to let him know he has one new voice message. The captain gave Yifan a nod, and Yifan typed in his password and waited for the message to playback.
“Hey, Yifan, it’s me... Zitao... meet me at the building that your clinic is in. I want just one more session with you before I’m gone for good.”
“He’s planning to run,” the captain said. With that, he hurried the officers along and Yifan led the way to the clinic.
The street was unusually congested, but what was strange was that there were very few cars but plenty of people. Some stood on the opposite sidewalk, but most stood in the middle of the street itself, all of them staring upwards. As Yifan tried to navigate the street, honking his horn to get the captivated citizens out of his way, he too tried to get a glimpse of what they were all looking at.
And then he saw it. There on the ledge of the roof of Yifan’s office building, ten storeys high, stood Zitao, rocking back and forth on his heels, a smile on his face.
The time between Yifan stopping his car in the middle of the street and running down the street to stand directly in front of the building were a complete blur. His heart was racing, and he was torn between trying to run inside and race to the top of the building to stop him and letting the police to the job for him.
“Oh, Yifan, you’re here!” Zitao shouted down at him. “I was waiting for you.”
“Zitao, get down from there,” Yifan said, only somewhat aware of the police presence around him, officers shouting at spectators to get back and others rushing into the building.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” Zitao said, grinning. “Be patient.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Yifan said. “Just come down and talk to the police. Confess what you did, and that’s it.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” Zitao asked. “I have no problem confessing what I did. I killed her, is that what you want to hear? Here’s the knife you were looking for.” Zitao wielded a blade coated in blood, so much that it could be seen plainly from the street.
“Suspect has a weapon, proceed with caution,” an officer said into his walkie-talkie.
“Okay, Zitao, now all you have to do is come down from there,” Yifan said.
“I said, I’ll be down soon! Be fucking patient,” Zitao barked. “You can tell your police friends not to bother. The door’s barricaded and there’s no other way up here. You can try all you want, but it’ll be too late by the time you figure anything out.”
“Zitao, things will be a lot easier if you turn around and let the officers bring you down safely,” Yifan pleaded. “They’re not going to hurt you, I promise you that.”
“It doesn’t matter what you promise me,” Zitao replied. “For once, I thought that maybe you’d be the one that stuck around. I really loved you, really cared for you, but you couldn’t do that for me. Every time I tried to show you how much I loved you, you’d threaten to call the police... are you really that scared of me, Yifan?”
Yifan didn’t respond. Nothing he said, he knew, would change Zitao’s mind at this point.
“She was keeping you from me. She was telling you that my shows of affection were wrong, she was telling you to call the police and take me away from you. She had to get out of the picture so that you and I could be together. It’s the truth, and you know it,” Zitao said.
“Go along with it,” the police officer closest to him suggested. Yifan nodded; doing so would probably talk Zitao down and that’s what he needed to do.
“Yes, you’re right,” Yifan said. “But you didn’t have to do it this way. You just had to talk to me, and tell me how you felt --”
“I did that! I did that the other night, and when I tried to make love with you, you pushed me away,” Zitao said, shoulders heaving now as he began to sob.
“If you get down from there, things will change,” Yifan said. “Think of how badly you’ll hurt me if you hurt yourself.”
“I don’t care anymore,” Zitao said, shaking his head. “I’m done. Do you want your knife?”
“Yes, and I want you to bring it to me,” Yifan said.
Zitao nodded. “Okay. I’ll bring it to you.” Zitao turned around, and Yifan only had time to breathe half a sigh of relief before the crowd around him started screaming and Zitao dove backwards off of the building, slitting his throat during his descent.
Dumbfounded, Yifan shut his eyes tight and only heard the sickening crack and splash of Zitao’s body hitting the cement. He opened his eyes momentarily, took in the sight, and promptly fainted.
“Do you think you could ever go back to psychiatry? You spent so many years and so much money to get to where you were, so wouldn’t it bother you in the long run if you let it go?”
Yifan shook his head, fighting back tears. “I... I can’t let myself be responsible for another... incident like that.”
“You weren’t responsible. He was gone long before you were able to get a chance to help him.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking... if I sent him back to Shenzhen then... then Jiaqi would still be here. I can’t promise that he wouldn’t have killed himself, but maybe... maybe he would have had a fighting chance. I don’t know, I feel like I caused all of this. I’ll pick a different career path but psychiatry... I couldn’t do that again and be confident in my abilities. I can’t.”
“Okay. That’s absolutely fine. I’m here to help you. I’m here for you every step of the way. Alright?” She looked up at the clock. “Okay, Yifan, it seems our time is up for today. Should we set another appointment for the same time next week, or would you want to see me earlier?”
“Next week sounds fine... but I may call you to speak to you before then because getting to sleep at night... it’s hell. I close my eyes and see him splattered...” Yifan gulped and closed his eyes tightly. “It’s hard.”
“I understand. My phone is always on.”
“Thank you,” Yifan said, standing up from his seat on the couch.
“The pleasure is all mine,” she replied, and Yifan made his way back home.