ecstasy

ecstasy

Author: Banma

Summary:

Summary:

In Southeast Asia in 1996, a small, humid town was filled with torn souls: they used their wounds as eyes to see the divine madness behind the world.

The alien creature in a yellow raincoat wanted to become a human, so it blended in with them.

------

Monsters sign for a cooking course

Write on the back of the tape:

"Please don't let Doudou find out

Our brains are better suited for jam"

Chapter 1 Doudou and the Angel's Head

After school that day, Doudou picked up an angel's head on the playground.

It leaned alone against the sandpit, swaying and occasionally rolling in the strong wind that blew between the teaching buildings. It must have seen Doudou coming: the 999 eyes on its face blinked, and its mouth opened and closed continuously - but without a trachea connected to it, the other students passing by could not hear its cries.

On this afternoon in 1993, autumn had already arrived in Mong Cai. A radio broadcast in Vietnamese and Chinese, looping, reminded students at the Second City Center Primary School not to linger inside the school.

In the crowd rushing home, no one paid any attention—so Doudou approached the head. Between the withered leaves and the shadows cast by the sun, he could see honey and milk oozing from the broken neck, seeping into a sticky mess in the corner of the sandpit. It was like someone had urinated there—only the smell was fresh and sweet, completely different from the school toilet.

Doudou saw it falling from the misty clouds and landing on the sand pit in the playground; so the owner of this head had an obvious answer.

Ta-ta, tap-ta.

The head sensed Doudou's approach. Unable to make a sound, it simply opened its plump, vermilion lips, revealing its white, square-like teeth. It quickly knocked its upper and lower teeth together, producing a series of crisp, fine sounds.

Its long, curly hair spread out, and what should have been a stream of platinum was now covered in sticky wisps by the body fluids and rough sand that overflowed from its neck.

Doudou squatted by the sandpit and beckoned it with his finger. This ownerless head reminded him of the dirty fur-covered dogs in the community:

"Suck, suck, suck; come here."

Da da da da da da——

The overlapping eyes filled the space that should have been the bridge of the nose, cheeks, and forehead. There were no eyebrows, no room for facial muscles to express themselves; relying solely on eyelashes and eyelids, the head was unable to express the slightest bit of "eyes" or "expression." It simply clicked its teeth faster, making a meaningless sound.

Doudou looked at it and bent his index finger again.

Suddenly:

The head trembled slightly at first, then began to sway left and right. The amplitude became larger and larger, finally causing the entire head to move—

Snap.

It finally rolled down the cement edge next to the sand pit, making a shallow pit in the sand.

"good."

Doudou stood up with satisfaction and leaned over. He wrapped his head tightly with the school newspaper, and the low-quality, easily blurred ink printed contradictory words between his nine hundred and ninety-nine eyelids.

Finally, I shook open the plastic bag that I had used to hold my breakfast and stuffed it in:

He walked slowly back home, holding his head high.

-

Walking through the corridor that was covered in urine stains and paint and turned brown and gray, Doudou opened the mailbox covered with rust and small advertisements and took out the tape that was delivered today.

They are all standard 3.5-inch AIT cassettes, with the plastic reels wrapped in black cloth into a large circle, waiting to play the recorded audio:

"Malaysian University Weekly Information", "Nanyang Technological University Newsletter - Idle Exchange", "Journal of Ecology - Discussion Zone".

There is no outer box packaging, just a simple piece of cut-out printed paper pasted on the shell: Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and Singapore in another corner - Dou Dou and his family had lived in these two places before moving to Mong Cai City.

He brought the tape closer and sniffed it gently: the smell of undried ink mixed with the rust in the mailbox was a bit pungent.

They were all push tapes from private forums and information sites: serious, boring, and hardly arousing Doudou's interest - he picked up the cover and put it carefully into his pocket; these [audio bulletin boards] that recorded quarrels and debates were subscribed by his parents.

[Hmm]

From the corner of the stairs, the dim sunset shone through the snow-like cement window, and the fading sunlight, cut into rectangles, shone on Doudou:

[Oh, I'm going to find a chance to subscribe to some tapes and listen to them.]

Clap!

Suddenly, there was a series of sharp sounds coming from the plastic bag in his hand: his head was rolling in the body fluids flowing out, and he didn't know what stimulated it.

-

Doudou pushed open the security door and then the second screen door. Mom huddled at one end of the sofa, her back to him. The TV at home was turned up high, with a piercing cacophony of noise:

"-- Designing targeting plasmids for the exons of the tyrosinase and Parkin genes in human embryos to obtain knockout—"

No one in this family cares about what is broadcast on TV on weekdays: it is just used as background music, adding a bit of noise to the small room.

But Doudou knew that her mother was watching those confusing overseas TV stations again. She secretly installed an antenna on the rooftop of her apartment building just to watch these strange programs:

"Mother."

Beep--

The mother turned off the TV and turned her head at the call: her brown pupils cast a gaze towards her son - their faces were not much alike.

Doudou was a beautiful child. Everyone but him knew this; the shape and arrangement of his facial features were so delicate that they had a kind of ambiguous androgynous beauty, but the muscles in his face rarely expressed emotion.

But my mother has dark skin from long-term sun exposure, visible pores, a flat and wide nose, and small eyes that appear vacant due to severe myopia, with fine lines appearing prematurely at the corners of her eyes.

Every characteristic is completely opposite to Doudou.

She stood up and walked towards Doudou. She grinned and waved her hands:

"Baby, are you back? How was school today?"

-

Doudou held the plastic bag in front of his face and showed it to his mother:

"I found something fun at school."

Gurgle, gurgle.

The angel's head twisted in the yellow and white liquid, squeezing and making strange noises; milk and honey were still overflowing, filling the folds at the bottom of the bag.

Mom only stared at the shaking plastic bag for a moment, then her eyes fixed on Doudou's face, unblinking. Her smile was replaced by tense muscles:

"What is this? A broken radio? An abandoned piece of equipment from the school?"

Doudou quickly lifted the bag up again as if to show off, spinning his head in the bag:

"I saw it fall from the sky! I guess it's an angel's head—"

Mom didn't answer. She suddenly leaned back with her right shoulder and swung her arms behind her; the gesture seemed to be stretching her chest.

Snapped!

The palm of his hand hit Doudou's face like a stone shot from a slingshot; the impact made him turn his head to the side, and his hair fell on his face.

"What did you say you saw?!"

Doudou put the plastic bag behind him and saw that his mother's palm was red and swollen like a balloon:

"Oh."

He didn't know how to answer, so he just mumbled some interjections that he himself couldn't understand -

Doudou's cheeks were still clean and smooth, without even the slightest red mark or swelling. He had never felt pain, and his skin, apart from the almost invisible pores, had no other marks: in fact, he didn't understand the meaning of the word pain.

Mom gripped his forearm fiercely again, and Doudou could hear the knuckles cracking from her fingers; but Mom was squeezing like she was trying to crush a steel pipe—Doudou's skin didn't even ripple from the pressure. Her facial muscles bulged, pushing her features toward the center:

"Skyfall! You saw Skyfall, didn't you?"

[It really fell from the sky.]

Doudou murmured and wanted to say something, but before he could answer, his mother shook her hand away and shrank back into the corner of the sofa.

She covered her face with her hands—the fingers of her right hand were comically swollen, as if air had been pumped into them:

"Impossible, there's no way I could have seen that. Everything was clearly—clearly according to plan."

Her voice became smaller and smaller until it became a whisper that only she could hear.

Teng!

The mother stood up suddenly, pushed the coffee table aside and rushed into the bedroom.

-

Mom locked herself in her bedroom, locked the door, and didn't come out for dinner. The phone at home was busy, and Doudou guessed she was calling Dad, who was on a business trip.

Doudou cooked a bowl of noodles and then cleaned out the fish tank in the corner of his room - he didn't remember when he bought it, but now the round tank was filled with broken water-based pens and draft paper - and poured the angel's head into it.

Milk and honey soaked half of the fish tank; it was like a hazy film on the glass.

Although Mom didn't seem too happy, she didn't stop Doudou from raising this foreign creature he had picked up:

Thinking of this, he fetched some more water from the kitchen and poured it into the fish tank. The head floated up and down in the murky water, the mouth opening and closing inexplicably; those overlapping eyes were wide open in the water.

"I'll buy some fish food to feed you tomorrow, be good."

Doudou yawned, curled up on the bed and fell asleep.

-

"Doudou--doudou! Doudou--doudou!"

In the middle of the night, Doudou woke up: on weekdays, he could always sleep until dawn; and Doudou never dreamed.

But this rising and falling call seemed to come from a distant dream.

The room was blurry and shrouded in a hazy twilight—not much light could penetrate the windows, which were covered with double layers of newspaper, and his parents would not allow him to turn on the lights at night.

It’s just that - he doesn’t know whether his parents know this - Doudou can still see everything clearly.

Next to the fish tank is an old Panasonic RF69D radio - it is so old that it can't even listen to the past content of my personal blog -

Doudou saw the head he had picked up with its mouth wide open:

Thin, red and blue wires extended from its mouth, extending out of the fish tank; passing around a poster of the Casio-Bandai handheld game console [Magic Swan], and finally climbing up to the radio on the cabinet next to it.

Buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz.

The cry that woke Doudou up came from here:

The volume switch suddenly turned on its own, and a voice with radio interference came from the radio:

"Dou-Dou! Dou-Dou! Do you hear me? Your parents want to kill you—"

Doudou climbed up from the bed, carefully stepped over the textbooks and workbooks surrounding the bed, and walked to the radio:

"Can you use a radio? That's really interesting."

Click.

He unplugged the radio and set it aside. He then unplugged the thin wires that extended from the skull's mouth one by one, and moved the fish tank to the corner of the room.

"Don't disturb me while I'm sleeping, I'm grumpy when I wake up."

Doudou then climbed back into bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter 2 Doudou and the Fallen Jawbone

"A few days ago, the [Future Destiny] spacecraft, the first multi-national joint launch of a manned Mars landing mission, exploded due to a booster failure."

"This internationally acclaimed event has undoubtedly cast a shadow over humanity's shared aerospace endeavors."

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Soviet General Mechanical Bureau are jointly developing a plan for the possible rescue of the missing astronauts."

Doudou yawned during the news broadcast on the radio--

A night passed, and his mother was still locked in her bedroom; not a sound came from her. He knocked on the door, said something, and went to school.

-