Danny read the test results he had recorded in his notebook.
He showed the doctor twenty different pictures of film and television stars. In the eyes of the doctor, all the movie stars with typical East Asian appearance are human, and he even recognized their names. In other photos, all the movie and TV stars who look close to the Caucasian race, including a Hollywood actor who is actually a Japanese-Italian hybrid, are all cats in the doctor's opinion.
Oh, except for Ben Affleck. He was recognized as a cheetah - why not a leopard
Danny thought aimlessly. In fact, even Hua Leopard couldn't understand him, and his Japanese wasn't that good yet. He could understand "cheetah" thanks to the Japanese word borrowed from English. And that doesn't matter at all. Leopards or cheetahs or cats, not humans anyway.
This is racism. Danny thought angrily.
Danny has rarely heard of discrimination against whites in Japan. In fact, the impression of Japan in his mind, in addition to the developed special service industry, is a well-known tourist destination. Hearing Japanese daily complaints about unsanitary and unruly parking from Americans who come to travel—to be fair, Danny thinks there are problems on both sides.
In any case, these are not of the same order of magnitude as the cognitive dissonance of doctors. On the contrary, some white supremacists discriminate against people of color, including East Asians, similar to the perception of doctors: those who are not of our race are not people. In the years after the plague, that group was quite active. With this handsome white Caucasian face, Danny might get a job with them, but it's better to be a cat with those people. He was afraid that the next second they were going to announce that Danny's eyes were not pure enough color and he had to kill himself immediately.
Doctors are much cuter in comparison - no, he shouldn't compare those people to doctors at all. Essentially, the doctor is a gentle and funny person. Danny really didn't understand the source of his cognitive dissonance. Why, did he meet one of the few reverse racists in the world
Danny is now sitting on the edge of the doctor's bed. From the window on the second floor, the snowfield stretched farther than before. At the end of the snowfield, the mountains were staggered like a wooden fence, and the sun was setting in that direction. It was a cloudless day, and the sky changed dramatically, with dark gold trims complementing the snow-white ridges. But Danny had no interest in watching. He turned his eyes to the bed.
The doctor frowned even when he was sleeping, and the muscles between the eyebrows were squeezed into two shallow vertical lines. Going up, there are two lines on the forehead, one shallow and one deep. Sometimes Danny wonders why doctors have forehead lines. He was about the tallest man Danny knew, at over 6-foot-4, taller than Ben Affleck, whom he described as a cheetah. The doctor is so tall, who can he look up to? He looked up, what was higher up
wack.
Danny groaned. That's what he said about the doctor on the day of the snow accident. Today, nearly two months later, his cognition of doctors has not improved. There are more and more mysteries, and Danny is almost overwhelmed.
But Danny likes him. No way, he loves him. Danny blames this emotion on the isolated winter days, the former perverted customer, the inconsistency of active learning and fulfillment, the only person to communicate with, the freshness, the drawbridge effect, Stockholm, and so on. He even blamed the crack left by a nail on the wall of the doctor's bedroom, because the doctor wrote a small line with an oil-based pen next to it: "X year X month X, the first time I used a cordless automatic hammer, a big failure..."
Danny blamed everything, but he could only blame it, but couldn't change it. He considers himself capricious, but he cannot be more unreasonable than love.
How unreasonable is love? Just two hours ago, when Danny had just cleaned up the doctor's vomit and wiped the corners of the doctor's mouth, he should have felt sick and tired no matter what, he still wanted to kiss him.
The doctor's collapse came without warning.
The doctor was looking at Danny's edited selfie in the study. Danny's plan is going well: his wicked ways are surprisingly effective, giving him the crux of the point that doctors treat him like a cat. But the doctor suddenly lost control of his emotions, trembling almost unsteadily, and finally even vomited. He looked so miserable that Danny didn't even bother to pursue that "why are you a human being".
He helped the doctor up to the second floor (considering his poor body shape, the verb "support" actually means "pull"), put him to sleep laboriously, and then went downstairs to clean up the messy study. Back in the bedroom, Danny was disturbed by the flushing and temperature on the doctor's cheeks. So he took a doctor's temperature, which was too high. Danny took a wet wipe and helped him wipe the sweat from his forehead and the stains from the vomiting from the corners of his mouth. To be honest, the smell was pretty unbearable.
But Danny still kissed him. A touch-and-go kiss is more like comfort than lust. The doctor wasn't awake at all, and Danny couldn't comfort him. He could only comfort himself, who was worried about the doctor's safety.
- Danny wouldn't admit it.
Two hours later, Danny took the doctor's temperature again. The reading is normal this time. Danny put the thermometer back in place. He was glad to see that the doctor had several different thermometers. Danny didn't have to take the thermometer that measured his rectal temperature and wondered if the doctor had cleaned and disinfected it while he was embarrassed.
Danny thought the doctor was weird long after the snow accident. That sense of disobedience manifested in the confrontation of goodwill and evil, as if the doctor was completely unaware that there was something wrong with the way he treated Danny. The snow accident makes Danny change his mind to believe that the doctor is not malicious, and the question that follows is what the doctor is thinking. He even thought about sterilizing Danny! The very different languages and cultures between the two took Danny a long time to explore. It wasn't until the sterilization topic and the rectal temperature incident that Danny really confirmed that the "cat" in the doctor's mouth was neither a taste nor a fetish, nor a cultural difference, but a cognitive dissonance.
Danny didn't study medicine, and he didn't study psychology—in fact, Danny didn't even go to college. But that didn't stop him from knowing that something was wrong with the doctor. It's so obvious that the doctor is crazy, if Danny wasn't in a special profession before, he should have seen it earlier.
The concept of "not a human being" is quite common in Danny's line of work. His former clients just thought they were not human beings in their line of work. Those people actually knew that Danny and his companions were human. They call Danny a cat, make him wear animal accessories to imitate the animal's movements, prohibit talking and require the use of animal sounds, use animal poses and correspondingly scaled props during sex/intercourse, and even play at the same time Images of animals mating. They are personified by their desire to control, stripped of their personality, erased their soul, and enjoy the superiority that comes with it. The reason they objectify is that "things" can be possessed, abused, and manipulated. It's all about sex/lust and power.
But the doctor's "not human" is different from this. On the one hand, he's a good guy and respects. He saved Danny, and Danny had to live like a parasite in his house because of the snow, and they even had the most deadly size gap in pure violence - a symbol of the three elements of power , the doctor never used it once after Danny learned to speak Japanese. He empowers Danny with love. The way he communicates with Danny is equal, even if Danny is just a talking cat in his eyes.
On the other hand, the doctor is worse than those people, he really thinks Danny is not human in the biological sense. He cared about Danny the way he cared about cats, giving him all kinds of things that cats would like, and he didn't even care about Danny's embrace. If Danny had a little inferiority complex, he would really think that the doctor didn't care about him.
Danny didn't know how to correct the doctor's cognitive problems, but he knew that some wounds were shallow on the surface but could not heal, usually because the inside was infected.
He has to go back to the source.
The doctor slept until evening and woke up.
It was said to be evening, and the sky in the mountains was completely dark. Danny turned on the light and sat at the window, writing and drawing on the notes he had made earlier. He has some plans, but none of them work well. In view of the doctor's record of vomiting and fainting in person, Danny was reluctant to take action directly. In Danny's eyes, the image of the doctor has changed from a stable and stubborn mountain to a glass ball in the palm of his hand, and he has to handle it with care.
In the interval between writing and drawing, Danny turned his head and met the doctor's gaze. He seemed to have been looking there for a long time, and when he saw Danny turned back, he naturally smiled. It's strange, Danny has seen him laugh not a thousand times but five hundred times, and when he sees it at this moment, he still feels an electric current running from the sky to the soles of his feet.
Don't show weakness! Danny demanded of himself. He walked towards the doctor, sat on the edge of the bed, and asked, "Are you okay?"
The doctor nodded, lifted the quilt and stood up. Danny's eyes moved involuntarily with his movements. Shit, be brave. Danny thought. He felt himself urgent in every sense. He needs to unravel the Doctor's mysteries, carefully, gently, and preferably quickly.
The urgency urged Danny to act. He has to get busy, or his brain will explode if he thinks wildly. Danny looked around and suddenly saw the doctor's phone. He asked the doctor to open a browser search page for him and started typing awkwardly.
"What do you want to check?" the doctor asked.
Danny hadn't actually figured out what keywords to search for. He was not familiar with the Internet in the first place. When he arrived at the doctor's house, he could only read Japanese websites, and he lacked interest. Because he can't use it, Danny's Japanese reading is much worse than his spoken language. He can't read Chinese characters, and his kana reading speed is relatively slow. Besides, the doctor basically asked for anything from him. Danny directly asked the doctor for help when he needed it. Now it's his turn to do it himself, which is really not used.
The doctor's browser and default page were things Danny had never seen before, and the designs were so complicated that his eyes hurt. Danny replied, "Looking for online counseling," recalling the pseudonym spelling.
Danny compared his own head, and suddenly felt that it was inappropriate, and changed it to the doctor's head. The doctor put the index finger on his forehead and made a very suspicious voice: "Huh?"
"The kind that accepts telephone consultations." Danny struggled to find the right Japanese words. "Telephone... hotline?"
"hotline?"
"right!"
"… Let me do it."
The doctor took the phone. As he searched for Danny, he watched without a trace. Danny could see the doubts in the doctor's mind. He might be wondering if Danny has a mental problem? In addition to wanting to be a man madly... Then again, in the doctor's eyes, he is a cat, so he may also be thinking about whether cats should be able to apply human psychology...
Thinking of this, Danny couldn't help but want to laugh. He tried hard to hold his expression. Less successful - the doctor looks more concerned. Danny simply laughed, and he asked the doctor, "How is it? Are there any suitable results?"
Danny's eyes fell on the search results page. His reading speed was so slow that the doctor simply summed up the search results for him. Apparently, there are hardly any residents in the surrounding 30 miles, and there is no profession as specialized as a psychiatrist in the nearest town. There are many telephone consultations, but the time zone that meets the language requirements is wrong, and there are language problems that meet the time zone requirements—
"Wait?" Danny thought it was too difficult to understand, he interrupted, "What is wrong with time zone? Japan doesn't seem to be that big, why is there a problem of crossing time zones? And what does the language problem mean? My Japanese It's not very good to say, but it's almost enough to communicate."
"But no Japanese is spoken in the town," the doctor explained patiently. "No Japanese is spoken here except at my house."
Danny is confused: "…doesn't Japan speak Japanese? No, wait, this is Japan, right?"
"Of course not, Japan doesn't have so many cats." The doctor looked at him strangely. "I said it, there are cats in town. There are far more cats than people here."
The muscles in the corners of Danny's eyes twitched violently.
He hadn't seen anyone since he was picked up by the doctor. The mountains were covered with snow in winter, and he hadn't been to the town or even seen other man-made structures. The doctor looks like a typical Asian. Everything in this house, from the bookcases to the computer and mobile phone networks, is in Japanese. He therefore subconsciously decided that this was Japan. Since it was Japan, Danny gave up thinking further about where he was, since he didn't know anywhere.
Danny previously lived in southern Florida, but he's pretty sure former clients have taken him out of the state. Or already out of America - who knows how he did it? Danny wasn't conscious at the time anyway. He had the impression that they had changed modes of transport once or twice, and the customs would not remember it. His passport has been kept in his carry-on bag and has now disappeared. He occasionally wondered whether he was smuggled in or applied for a medical exemption, but after all, Danny had never been out of the country before, and he didn't know what the entry inspection was like. It was useless to think too much. The concept of "this is Japan" was preconceived, and Danny never thought about other possibilities.
But now, the doctor told him, this is not Japan. The doctor also said that there are a lot of cats here. Danny already knew what the doctor's idea of a cat actually meant.
Danny remembered their conversation about hunter licenses and logging licenses. At that time, he only thought that the rules were like this everywhere in the world, and there was no association at all. Looking back now, I can even match the name of this certificate. Is he still in the United States? Danny felt a chill. He began to regret not doing a good job of researching the Internet because of the language barrier and the overly garish Yahoo site on the doctor's homepage.
impossible. Danny thought.
He instructed the doctor to help him open the map. The default home page displayed on the doctor's map is Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Click the small icon in the lower right corner, and the picture changes from a city to a mountain. The first thing that catches the eye is the unfamiliar katakana place name, which cannot spell meaningful words. Danny zoomed out a few times, and mountains, mountains, and more mountains appeared in the map field of view on the screen. Continuing to shrink, more place names finally appeared. Both were unfamiliar and couldn't spell out easily, but Danny recognized the word in the lower right corner.
Yellowstone.
"Again," Danny demanded.
This time, an interstate border appeared in his sight. Montana above, Idaho below. The road in front of Jiushi's house had long since disappeared from the map, and even the town 30 miles away had become a shapeless dot, except for the mountains where they stood, standing indifferently at the junction of the two states.
They were indeed in the United States, two thousand miles away in Florida, in the paradise of Idaho.
In a flash, Danny figured out a lot of things. How could he be so stupid to miss such an obvious clue and waste two whole months? Danny should have known. He should understand why the doctor lives in isolation, why he is a promising doctor but never has a business, why he is so enthusiastic about learning Japanese for himself; he also understands why the doctor is so panic when he talks about the uncanny valley effect.
Before Danny appeared, three and a half years ago, at a sensitive time when the plague was rampant, the doctor didn't speak English, with an East Asian face, and came to America alone. That year, he arrived not in Idaho, but in Idaho, which is always crimson.
The doctor is not racist, he is a victim of racism.