《[张国荣]鱼鸣赞歌》裴青_Cyane

2、Fairytale adaptation: the Hymn of the water fairies

　　1. The understory of the Ocean
　　There’s a world far out at sea where the flood is dirty as the blue robin bird’s plume on the tail, and the thick mist has been hanging over the surface since the beginning of the universe. The sunlight pierced the surface, yet it failed to reach down to the sand. The moonlight danced on the wave as they are ushered away. Ships never make it to their destination; the storm will swallow them into the darkness.
　　Deep down the sea is a vineyard where the father god planted his grapes. Cyun Sin has lived here for generations. Their tears drop into shiny pearls that carry death back to life and cure all the pain; their song lures the living ones and deceives their memory. Nothing can take away their tears except love. They don’t easily fall in love with anything besides their family and their destiny. However, once they knew their destiny had another partner, this unfortunate Cyun Sin would have only 5 days left to live.
　　Reminder, here’s a reminder, do not fall in love, as her grandma whispered. Let them be fond of you, but don’t give away your heart. Or you’ll turn into stone.
　　Murphy doesn\'t know these words are not nursery rhymes. This song was the curse of her family, alive with their blood. Murphy was born on April 1st. Her eyes are gold and silver and blue; her fins are exquisite; her lips are red as a cherry. Infatuating, maddening. On her 16th birthday, an uninvited guest arrived. Leslie, the water fairy who was once a human from the world above the sea, where the air was toxic and no creatures from underwater would survive. His appearance was ethereal, gathered by ashes.
　　Please, sir, or madam. Don’t confuse water fairies with Cyun Sin. They are different creatures. Water fairies are those who died as earthly live living in the earthly world and finally ended up in the understory of the ocean.
　　This is where my story begins. Welcome to my world. I’m Murphy.
　　Never I had gained that kind of strange feeling inside me. Something was itching, cracking. I was hoping that it would stop, yet it didn’t. This is how fate took everything. It is the happiness of found and the bitterness of ambivalence. He was not a Cyun Sin, which means this curse doesn’t work on him. He will not die because of me, yet I’ll die once I know he had a lover. This instinctual cell apoptosis program was graved in our soul.
　　There are always things we couldn’t explain, and this bloody curse is one among them.
　　At first, he thought we were hallucinations, and he was panicking. Alone, standing against the biological instinct of drawing on survival and avoiding perish, I reached my hand out to touch his fingertips. Have you ever seen Star Trek? It’s like Vulcan mind meld. The telepathic link between two individuals, whose fates were tied together by the hands of God, from two distanced worlds. Our hands are the bridge of mind communication, and we share consciousness in a kind of gestalt.
　　Fascinated by his thoughts, I was inevitably attracted by him. I wished I had never met him, but he is the perfect matching. Even when our hands are apart, he could still infer most of my thoughts, and I could easily guess what he wants to say in the next second. We were different souls in the opposites of a mirror.
　　Things above the sea were mysteries to me. He knew this, and he often talks with us about the world where he came from. His songs, movies, and families. By the way, you might know him, for he was a famous singer and actor. He said he suicided and jumped off from a building because of clinical depression. Somehow, he woke up at the bottom of the sea after he lost consciousness. His voice was gentle and light, but I could tell he was missing the world upon when he’s silent. Why would you miss such a terrible place where fish can’t survive and human thoughts are malicious? Whenever I talk about it, he always says, “you won’t understand, and you’d better not understand it.”
　　That was a sunny day, the mist upon the sea was cleared away for no reason. Boats, ships, and submarines stirred up the area. Leslie was vigilant, he floats upon those giants, yet he returned with unfortunate news.
　　“Run! These ships are here for pearls!”
　　You might have already guessed what happened. Our pearl tear can bring back the dead, and humans do not care about other species. They say high-sounding rhetoric and protect other species because those are beneficial to their survival. Humans always pursue after values, isn’t it? My grandmother’s mother was slaughtered by humans. In my ears, the grieved scream still resounds. Intertwining, my tail was pierced by a fishhook in the web. Elevating, approaching the surface pulling by ropes. I couldn’t remember how we got out of that mess. The only thing I could recall is I opened my eyes in the vineyard, and Leslie become shallower than before.
　　Eventually, my doom arrived.
　　“I saw him, he was on that ship passing by.”
　　Should have known it, I should have known it. His partner from the outside world. The cracks of my heart condemned my end, five days later. Driven by the fear of death, I went on a journey to the deep sea, where the water is dark as nothing. The sound of countless huge fingers scratching the glass echoes inside me, almost driving me crazy.
　　My consciousness slipped into the deepest part of the sea. The warm and freezing undercurrents surged, and from the distance, I saw a colossal silhouette depicted by the creepy green light. Suddenly, the whole world stood still right at that moment. I’m sitting on a soft surface. The surface was floating as if there was life. I was trying to adapt my eyes to the darkness when two huge red dots suddenly appeared in front of me. It was a pair of eyes, infinitely deep. With the red light in his eyes, I further saw his appearance. Beneath his face was an octopus-like tentacle. The tentacles spreading on his body formed a net and held me within it. I saw you, I whispered, the sea witch.
　　She was immersed in a kind of motherly amusement. “You can break the curse by killing him, and unlike your normal weapons, my knife could stab into his heart and condemn his demise. I just need your left eye, that doesn’t cost much compared with your life.”
　　Marching back to the vineyard, the night fell before I returned. Intentionally passing by his window, I peeped at his bed. He was there, lying as he was dead. I stood there until the first light of the first sun raised after I was convicted shined on my disordered red hair. How can I do that? How? I thought I’d be cruel. With guilt, I hid from him all day.
　　The evening sun shined above the water like it did thousands of years before, and it’s getting colder and colder. Why not sing the hymn to him? Erase his memory of his lover, and fill it with our future. Wouldn’t that be nice? All it takes is a hymn of mine. Wishing that this time I’ll succeed, I pried open the lock of the door and sneaked upon his bed. Borrowing the faint light from the fluorescent plants twinkled outside the window, my eyes pictured his outline.
　　Innocent slumber like this.
　　I’m not supposed to deceive him.
　　Or maybe it’s his partner’s fault. The one, standing on the bow of the ship, was Leslie’s partner from the world outside the water. I cried to the sea bird, peck him to blind.
　　With satisfaction, I watched him fall.
　　But I paid for it.
　　At the moment I saw him crushed into my sight holding that dead body, I knew my destiny. Even before Leslie said a word, I grabbed his hands in mine, engraved his face in my mind, and devoted my pearl using the only eye that I’ve left with. My green hair lost its shinning texture during these days, and it looks like withered flowers baked into chips. I saw my body gradually become fragmented, into dust, drowned in the water.
　　I saw him stood there in shock, and suddenly trying to cover my eyes with his hands so that I’ll not let my tears fall, trying to hold my fragments so that I’ll not drift away. In a trance, I heard him singing the hymn I ought to sing to him.
　　I forgot that we can mind meld when our fingers touched. But I don’t care.
　　I dreamed of white lilies blooming all over the mountains; I dreamed that I didn’t pick the most beautiful flower among them. We are like two lines in the air, which seem to intersect. But looking from a different angle, we are parallel lines.
　　We are the right ones for each other, but it’s all about fate.
　　I shall let go.

　　2. The hymn of the water fairies
　　Hi there, it is me, the observer here telling this story to you.
　　Just as Murphy said, there are always things we can’t explain. You don’t have to know who I am. But let me tell you another story that begins at the same time that Leslie and Murphy met on Murphy’s 16th birthday.
　　The moment Murphy woke up, she became a human with 16 years of memory of her earthly life. She woke up on the evening of April 1, 2003. The TV was on, with news displaying accompanied with sharp noises. A man named Leslie just jumped down from the 24th floor of a hotel. His songs and photos were everywhere, and people are talking about him, his songs, movies, and scary gossips about his suicide motivation. Daffy, a man, was his partner acknowledged in front of the public. They both came out a long time ago.
　　Murphy doesn’t know why her tears rolled down into her collar. She felt she have heard that name a long time ago, yet the fog shrouds her memory. Together with the memories of the past were sealed up.
　　The song kept playing, till a line of lyrics bumped into her ears: “In the Grape Garden, the hymn of water fairies echoed.”
　　She paused, frowned, and turned off the television.
　　Looks like the hymn worked, she couldn’t recall even a word.

作者有话说

　　Author’s notes:
Murphy lived for two lives. One is underwater, one is above water; one is with the one she loved, and one is after her love died (this sentence has two means, her love died and the one she loved died as well). For Leslie, he lived two lives. One is above water, one is underwater; one is with the one he loved, one is the story of regaining their relationships.