Doomsday Wonderland: A thank-you extra for the boss of “I won’t look back at the explosion” (Part 2)
"You know the answer,"
Qing Jiuru remembered seven or eight days ago and replied in a calm voice. As he spoke, he stood up and poured himself a glass of bourbon - this time he didn't even bother pretending it was a different drink. "The airport, that flight attendant."
"Tell me more carefully," Raph encouraged gently.
...He had just returned from Agios at that time.
Half the time, he didn't use the first-class aisle, and that time too. Kiyokuru was alone among the tired passengers who had just gotten off the plane and were waiting to go through border control. No one realized his identity.
He doesn't hate this feeling. There is a hustle and bustle around us, full of the strands and impurities of human life: my fourth business trip this year, visiting my sister who just gave birth to a baby, I had a fight while traveling, I bought popular products at duty-free prices... I am in the airport. When the time comes, the shell that has been formed in daily life will often melt away.
For Qingjiure, switching between mediocre, dazzling, cautious and other traits is almost as difficult as pressing a button; if he wants to play the role of a passenger who has just got off the economy class, even without wearing a mask or sunglasses, and would be almost unrecognizable - although he didn't take that risk very often.
Perhaps it was because he switched between kaleidoscope personalities too much that he needed to take some time off from time to time, seeing no one, waiting for his soul to catch up in quiet loneliness.
"Hey, did you see it?"
Behind him was a couple in their fifties. The wife called her husband. "Aren't those crew members over there the ones on our flight?"
Crew members have separate inspection channels and usually pass by the long queue of passengers. Qingjiureu looked across the crowd and found the pilots and flight attendants standing in the distance, whispering something.
"That blonde with the French braid, she's not a flight attendant," the wife said a little eagerly: "She's the woman who was in the news last month, do you remember? She wanted to pretend to be a nurse. Entering the hospital...she came here today to pretend to be a flight attendant?"
She seemed very excited about her discovery, and her voice became louder. The passengers around her became more energetic after hearing this, and turned to look at the flight attendant in the distance. Most of the nearby passengers got off the same flight. Not long after, Qingjiu Liu heard someone say one after another: "Really, I have never seen her on the plane." "Does she work in business class or first class?" Yes?" "What are you doing here? Terrorist attack? Are you armed?"
From the perspective of the crew members, I am afraid that the faces of this large group of passengers staring at them are like dog urine moss that suddenly appears after the rain... Qingjiure thought to himself.
The whispers and speculations were scattered among the crowd like the wind, quickly spreading to half of the hall at an astonishing speed. People raised their mobile phones and secretly recorded videos, calling up news comparisons from the previous month; some even walked out of the line and pretended to pass by the blonde woman casually... Even the border inspection staff turned around from behind the glass plate.
Qing Jiuru couldn't bring himself to be interested at all.
100% of the time it was a mistake. Among a group of crew members who have been working together for at least two or three days, if a stranger suddenly wandered in, the others would have discovered it by now; they were standing in a circle talking, and could see each other's faces clearly - —What's more, they haven't gone through border control yet, and there are only people here who have just gotten off the plane.
"But you guessed it wrong, right?" Raph's tone was neither critical nor sarcastic, it was very calm.
That glass of bourbon seemed to be gone in just one sip.
Qingjiuru leaned on the bar lazily and bonelessly, turned on his phone, and glanced at the discussion thread he had just seen half of.
When he watched it just now, not everyone lost their minds; many retweets were ridiculing Tony Slade - it was indeed Tony Slade's face, acting skills and lines in the movie, saying He didn't participate in the show, which is like saying the sun doesn't rise during the day, and there's no need to defend it.
Now Qingjiuru flipped through several pages in a row, but only saw a few short rebuttals.
"Yeah," he heard his own voice ringing in the distance. "...I must have guessed wrong."
A passenger walked around the crew members twice with his mobile phone and was stopped by the captain. The two lowered their heads and said a few words, and the passenger was led into the circle of crew members; during the few minutes they talked quietly, almost half of the people in the hall held their breath and stretched their arms toward them desperately. Long neck.
From among the circle of flight attendants, someone let out a low exclamation.
The back of the blond head with the French braid suddenly turned to the side. Qingjiuru followed her gaze and saw the airport guard nearby who was maintaining order - the latter was doing his job faithfully, facing the long line of passengers, holding a machine gun in front of him in both hands.
As soon as the figure in the bright red airline uniform let go, the trolley suitcase fell to the ground. The next brief moment seemed to be split and stretched into a picture on the director's screen.
No one expected that she would suddenly let go and start running; at the same time, Qingjiu Liu also knocked away the person in front of him and suddenly jumped out of the crowd.
When the blond flight attendant rushed behind the guard, the guard had already turned half of his body towards her. He had been standing alone, now becoming a rare island apart from the gossip in the lobby; when he saw that the person coming was a flight attendant, he even asked: "What's wrong?"
Without saying a word, the blond flight attendant had already grabbed the pistol at his waist. I don't know whether it was because of the angle, speed or cleverness. Even though the tall and strong guard reacted in time, turned around and raised his hand to stop her, the gun was still pulled out of the holster and caught in her hand - the entire hall. Finally there was a wave of exclamation.
"She has a gun-" someone yelled mid-sentence.
When the blond flight attendant raised his gun towards the guard, Kiyokuru had already pulled the travel bag off his shoulder. He raised his arm and shook it hard. The travel bag drew a parabola from mid-air and hit it heavily. Half of her body. The blond flight attendant screamed in pain, and the pistol flew out of his hand, hitting the ground with a clang.
She seemed not to have expected that she would be hit by a bag, and even turned to glance at Qingjiuru - she was about forty years old, and she didn't know if she recognized him, her eyes suddenly widened, There was a bit of surprise and confusion on his face, as if he couldn't figure something out.
Another guard not far away put the head of a stun gun into her back at this moment.
The surprise and confusion froze and shattered on her face, and her face finally fell into the air and fell to the ground.
"...I slipped away quietly before anyone discovered my identity." Qingjiuru reached out from the drawer and took out a crumpled, half-burned white paper roll, lowered his head, and lit it. Got lighter.
The paper sizzled as it was heated by the firelight.
"But someone still recognized you," Love said, familiar with the second half of this story. "I saw it on several news headlines, and they all praised you as a hero."
...This is one of the reasons why he hid at home for seven or eight days at a stretch.
Qingjiuru lowered his eyelids and took a deep breath of the scroll.
He knew the face that fell to the ground.
When she got on the plane, she stood at the door of the cabin, nodding and smiling at the people getting on the plane, saying hello.
In the next few minutes, the hall almost became an incubator of screams and chaos; among the people rushing up, Qingjiuru saw another male flight attendant standing with her at the time. When the male flight attendant's eyes fell on her, there was no change on his face. He shook his head and said, "I don't know her! I've never seen her before. She must have just sneaked in."
...In fact, even Qingjiu Liu is not sure now whether he has seen the blond flight attendant on the plane.
"You are flying first class. You have never seen her in first class, right? No one else has seen her in economy class. If she is a real flight attendant, she can only be in business class." Fu analyzed, "Don't you think it's strange? When you got on the plane, how could you see her greeting passengers at the first-class door?"
"I'm sleeping most of the time, so I'm not sure." Qingjiuru also felt a bit pale in his explanation.
"Are you smoking?" Raph suddenly said, "I don't like the smell of cigarettes. Can you wait until I leave before smoking?"
"Smoke?" Qing Jiuliu couldn't help but smile, and the white smoke with the smell of earth and grass flew away from his lips, lingering and floating in the air. "No, I know you don't like cigarettes——"
Halfway through this sentence, he almost choked and coughed due to the sudden strong taste of nicotine in his mouth; in confusion, he quickly lowered his head and glanced at the white paper roll in his hand, and almost froze.
"Second-hand smoke is more harmful than first-hand smoke," Love advised still gently.
Qingjiuru pinched off the burning end of the paper bit by bit. He pulled off the rolling paper and looked at it - it was tobacco.
He was probably stunned for a while, because when Raph spoke again, she was holding up her mobile phone, and her voice was full of doubts.
"You said...you've seen Tony Slade's new movie, are you sure it's him? Really?"
She said ~IndoMTL.com~ while handing the phone to Kiyokuru.
It was a short video taken from a movie, which was slowed down. Tony Slade’s short and wide face was on the right side of the screen, speaking a line——
Is it... is he himself?
Qingjiuru narrowed his eyes and took the phone unconsciously. He had never been nearsighted, but he felt like he was gradually becoming nearsighted now; the face in the video looked like Tony Slade for a while, and then vaguely twisted into the outline of a stranger.
The more than two thousand comments below seem to be more than two thousand versions of the same core meaning.
He obviously watched the movie twice, but he never... didn't realize that the lead actor was not the lead actor himself.
"Speaking of which," Raph said gently, "your life must be very dark and lonely, with no hope, right?"
Qingjiuru slowly raised his head.
The voice of the lines uploaded on the mobile phone fluctuates, sometimes solidly, sometimes lightly and vaguely.
"Among the counselors I have contacted, you are a very, very serious example." She sighed, "Have your suicidal thoughts worsened recently?"
Qingjiuru opened his mouth, but no sound came out for a moment. Only the dry and bitter taste of nicotine on the tip of his tongue was clearly imprinted on his consciousness.
Has he...did he ever have thoughts of committing suicide?