When I was a child, my father once gave me a ten-yuan bill as pocket money.
He said he had picked it up on the road.
I remember very clearly that on the back of that bill, written in black ink, was a line:
“There is a pyramid scheme on the fifth floor. Help.”
I took the money to show my father, and he smiled and told me,
“Who knows how many people have used this bill? Who knows when those words were written? Maybe the person who wrote them has already been rescued.”
I was in a hurry to buy chocolate, so I didn’t think much about it.
Because chocolate is sweet, after all.
Not long after, there was a piece of news on TV.
“A man mistakenly entered a pyramid scheme den, was beaten to death, and then dismembered.”
As a child, I stared blankly at the television.
My father also stared blankly at the television.
I asked him what was wrong.
He shouted at me angrily, telling me not to meddle in his business, and then left the house.
At the time, I didn’t know what was going on; I just felt confused.
It wasn’t until the New Year, at the family dinner, that my father got drunk and cried uncontrollably. In front of all the relatives, he confessed to picking up that bill.
The place where he found the money was directly below the den mentioned in the news.
In other words, the words on that ten-yuan bill were very likely written by someone who had fallen into that pyramid scheme, possibly even the person who was dismembered.
He sobbed, clutching a bottle of liquor, saying that it was his fault that the man died. The whole family comforted him, but I just stood aside, dumbfounded and at a loss.
So… I used that money to buy chocolate…
Something indescribable seemed to awaken within me.
Throughout my later life, I would often think of that ten-yuan bill.
I wondered, was the original owner of that money alright? Was he really rescued? Or… did that money really come from the man who was dismembered?
If it really came from him, he must have endured painful beatings and inhuman torture before finally seizing a chance one day to write those words for help on the bill and toss it out the window.
He must have clung to hope for rescue until the very moment he died.
Yet my father ignored that hope.
I always ask myself, if I had been the first to find that bill, could I have saved him? Or would I have overlooked the writing, just like my father?
This thought haunts me like a ghost, tormenting my mind more and more as I grow older.
Until that day.
A new “bill” appeared before me.
…
