短文1

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The Overdose Story

一

When the news came, I was still half-dissolved in pregabalin and rain.

It was the evening of April 14th, Beijing just turning from cold to that sticky kind of spring heat, and I stepped off the slow train with a backpack full of lecture notes, half空 blister packs, and one bottle with the label carefully scratched off. My head still hummed with withdrawal and rebound—too many nights in the south hiding from everyone, pretending I’d “retired” from everything, including myself.

The campus smelled of damp soil and coal smoke. I walked under the plane trees, past the red banners about “stability,” and every few steps someone would nod at me a second too long, as if trying to match my face with a rumor.

“Super-After-After-Goto is back,” I heard a boy whisper as I climbed the dorm stairs. The nickname sounded like someone else’s skin.

When I pushed open the door of the old ODWIKI “research room,” dust rose like a slow detonation. The wooden table was still there, scarred with years of scratched receptor names and dose calculations. On the wall, our hand-drawn chart of “Common Non-Scheduled Overdose Drugs” had yellowed:
DXM, pregabalin, memantine, dihydrocodeine cough syrups, amantadine, the usual over-the-counter arsenal we had spent so long demystifying, neutralizing, re-describing as “substances with risks” instead of demons.

Part of me had hoped it would all be gone. Lock the door, seal the era.

Instead, 55555 was there, in the half-dark, sitting on the table with his legs dangling, a cigarette dying between his fingers. His eyes were ringed with purple, the kind that doesn’t come from just staying up late.

“You picked your day,” he said.

“What happened?” I put my bag down carefully, as if it contained explosives. In a way, it did.

He didn’t answer. Just handed me a folded scrap of newspaper, so soft with rereading it felt like cloth.

The headline:
“Comrade Hu Yaobang Passes Away.”

I read the sub-lines twice before the words arranged themselves: “Died in hospital after sudden illness,” then the colder, internal phrase that everyone already knew but the paper would not print: overuse of a certain anticonvulsant, a name that people whispered like a curse.

Pregabalin.

The same chemical sitting in my bloodstream, humming at the edge of my nerves.

“Officially they’re pushing the line that it’s ‘irresponsible drug use’,” 55555 said. “Internal notices are calling it ‘abuse of sedative medication.’ You know what comes next.”

“Scheduling,” I said. My mouth was dry. “They’ll make it a controlled substance. Overnight.”

“They already have the drafts,” he said quietly. “A teacher I trust sneaked us a glance. They’re packaging it as ‘combatting emerging campus abuse.’”

He looked at me in that sideways way of his, both mocking and pleading. “They’re going to say Hu died a junkie, Goto. And they’re going to use us—our kind of people—as his shadow.”

The room tilted slightly. I couldn’t tell if it was the floor or my spine.

I didn’t like Hu Yaobang. I didn’t dislike him either. He’d been a distant constellation in the political sky, occasionally mentioned in debates I half-listened to while calculating receptor affinities in the margins. But the idea of them writing “drug abuser” on his death certificate, then turning to our little world and saying: “See? This is what they are”—

That lodged somewhere behind my sternum like a pill taken dry.

I sat down. “Who knows?”

“Everyone will,” 55555 said. “And some of them have already decided what to do about it.”

He reached under the table and pulled out a thick stack of handwritten pages—our old ODWIKI “Harm Reduction Compendium,” copied by hand to avoid official printers. He flipped past my entries—“Pregabalin: Pharmacology and Overdose Risk,” “Memantine Combinations: What We Know, What We Don’t”—my careful disclaimers, my neat receptor diagrams.

“You thought retirement meant you could leave this mess,” he said quietly. “But the mess didn’t leave you.”

Before I could answer, footsteps came down the corridor. I recognized them: quick, eager, heavy-heeled.

Mouse-tail walked in without knocking, arms full of foreign-language magazines, hair still wet from the drizzle. Behind him, half-hidden, a girl with mismatched socks and pupils too wide: Little Cat.

“So it’s true,” Mouse-tail said, grinning in that arrogant way that made people admire him before they hated him. “The old pharmacist returns on the eve of the storm.”

“What storm?” I asked, though I already knew.

He tossed a magazine down in front of me. It was some Western harm reduction journal, photocopied three times, the ink already blurring. On the cover: a headline about “Drug Policy Reform in the West.”

“In their countries,” Mouse-tail said, “people die from overdose and it’s a public health issue. Here, someone dies after long-term medication and they call it ‘morality.’ You really think we can stay in the lab?”

The girl—Little Cat—leaned against the doorframe, her voice thin and bright: “They’re building a story, Senior Goto. And we’re in it whether we like it or not.”

I could feel the pregabalin at the base of my skull, a slow warmth, a promise: if you just take a bit more, you don’t have to feel any of this too sharply.

Instead I said, “Who else is back?”

Mouse-tail’s grin faltered. “Chicken Brother’s been on the Square since yesterday.”

Of course.

“And Dew Rain?” I asked.

55555 exhaled smoke. “Selling dreams. Here and there. We need to talk about that too.”

I didn’t want to. But I nodded. Outside, the last daylight slid down the red-brick walls like something spilled and wasted.

That night, before sleep, I opened my own notebook and wrote:

April 14th. I came back. Hu died. Pregabalin in both of us.
This is either coincidence or the cruelest kind of symmetry.
I always thought my worst enemy would be ignorance.
I forgot about narrative.

I took another capsule before turning off the light. For nerve pain, I told myself, though I knew I meant a different kind of nerve.

二

I didn’t sleep.

The next morning, April 15th, the campus loudspeakers crackled to life unusually early, and the first official notice of Hu Yaobang’s death floated over the dormitory roofs in a voice so careful it sounded drugged.

In the courtyard, students clustered in irregular circles, whispering. Some genuinely mourned a reformer, someone who had once said soft things about students and open air. Others just smelled an opening—any opening.

We, as usual, smelled chemicals.

By midday, leaflets appeared like mushrooms after rain. Not the big-characters yet—those would come—but small, neat, cautious documents: calls for a memorial assembly, suggestions for black armbands, timid phrases like “let us reflect on the future of our country.”

That afternoon, in the back corner of the library, Mouse-tail spread his foreign magazines out like contraband Scripture. Around him gathered our kind: overcaffeinated, underfed, pupils fluctuating in size, hair unwashed, notebooks crammed with both receptor diagrams and borrowed slogans.

“Our entry point is clear,” he said, stabbing a page with his finger. “In the West, when a public figure dies with medication involved, there are investigations, public debates, sometimes reform. Here they jump straight to ‘moral failing.’”

He held up a crude photocopy of an article: “Pregabalin: From Neuropathic Pain to Recreational Use—Policy Challenges.”

“If we don’t speak now,” he said, “they will define ‘drug’ in whatever way is most convenient to crush us.”

“Most of the others don’t care about drugs,” Little Cat said softly. Her voice always carried that manic-labile edge, like she might burst into laughter or tears without warning. “They want political reform.”

“Then we remind them,” Mouse-tail said, eyes flashing. “If they can’t even accept that a dying man has the right to be treated with a modern anticonvulsant without being called an addict, you think they’ll let you write a constitution?”

He looked at me. Of course he did.

“You built the language,” he said. “All those entries. ‘Overdose,’ ‘non-medical use,’ ‘harm reduction.’ The words are yours. Come to the Square and take responsibility for them.”

I thought about the past months of “retirement”: the quiet guest lectures in peripheral campuses, the nights alone with my own dosages, trying to reclassify myself from “experimenter” to “patient.”
Pregabalin, DXM, memantine in careful rotations, like someone shuffling poison cards.

“I’m not clean,” I said, before I could stop myself.

55555, who had been silent, snorted. “Name one of us who is.”

He laid out, on the table between us, a simple sheet of paper with four bullet points:

• Clarify the circumstances of Hu’s medication and death
• Oppose the blanket scheduling of pregabalin as “drug of abuse”
• Demand transparent drug policy and public harm-reduction education
• Stop using the term “drug addict” as a political insult

“Not democracy,” he said. “Not system overhaul. Just this. Something they can’t accuse of being ‘too vague’ or ‘foreign-influenced.’ The others can shout about big things. We ask for the smallest atom of freedom: the right to our own nerve endings.”

I stared at the paper. My own entries on ODWIKI flashed in my mind: all those careful disclaimers, all those “this is not an encouragement,” my old arrogance thinking that if I explained enough, the world would fall into line.

“Fine,” I said. “But understand this: I’m going as a pharmacist, not as a politician.”

Little Cat laughed lightly. “In this country, that’s the same profession.”

三

The first night at the Square, I did not feel like a revolutionary. I felt like a drug dealer who had wandered into the wrong festival.

It was April 17th. The air above Tiananmen shimmered with candlelight and breath; underfoot, the stone felt colder than it had any right to in spring. The giant portrait watched us with that expressionless half-smile, as if he’d seen a thousand such evenings and knew how they all ended.

Students knelt with flowers and black ribbons, some genuinely grieving, others checking how they looked in each other’s eyes. Banners were cautious at first: “Eternal Memory,” “The People Will Not Forget.”
The politics major kids practiced phrases like “reform,” “corruption,” “accountability,” as if tasting spices.

We spread our own materials at the edge of the crowd.

On an old army blanket, 55555 arranged neatly handwritten pamphlets: “Basic Facts About Pain Medication,” “What is Overdose?,” “Hu’s Drug Was Not ‘Opium’,” “Why Prohibition Kills.”
Our handwriting shook slightly—not from fear, mostly from caffeine, nicotine, and the fine tremor that comes from chronic pregabalin plus too many nights awake.

“Over there,” Little Cat whispered, nodding.

On the other side of the Square, under a low streetlamp, a group of students had laid out little packets wrapped in newspaper. I recognized the slant of posture, the sideways glances. They weren’t selling manifestos.

“That’s Dew Rain,” said 55555 under his breath. “That must be ‘Moon Dust.’”

I had heard about it even from exile: a “side-effect-free” powder, dosage by capsule, promises of clarity, dissociation without hangover. No published formula, no lab notes. The sort of thing I had spent the last few years teaching people to fear.

Dew Rain himself stood slightly apart, glasses reflecting the streetlight, hair neatly combed—almost academic, until you noticed the fingers stained faint pink from handling some reagent. His followers were already whispering like he was a prophet. They called what he sold “progress.”

Mouse-tail’s jaw tightened. “Later,” he murmured. “Tonight is the old man’s.”

I tried to pay attention to the speeches.

One after another, students stepped onto a makeshift platform: overturned crates, a megaphone passed hand to hand. They spoke of ideals, of opening up, of old wounds. It was real, I suppose. It just floated a meter above my head, out of reach.

Then, half an hour in, a political science student—tall, sharp-cheeked—raised his voice:
“We must demand a change in the political system. Without full democracy, we will never have—”

Mouse-tail moved like he’d planned it.

He climbed onto the other end of the crates and took the megaphone when it passed near him.

“Comrade,” he said politely, smiling, “I agree with your anger. But let me ask you something.”

The crowd turned, half-curious, half-annoyed.

Mouse-tail lifted his foreign journal. “In the countries you envy, when a person is prescribed a medication, they get a printed sheet explaining its risks and benefits. They can sue if the drug was mishandled. Their doctors are not afraid to use new compounds because of political backlash.”
He let that hang. “Can we even get that?”

Murmurs, confused.

“You say you want democracy,” he continued, still smiling. “But right now, you don’t even have the right to read a truthful leaflet about what you put in your own body. They can redefine a treatment as ‘drug abuse’ overnight, to fit a narrative. If we can’t win something as small, as concrete, as this—knowledge of the molecules in our veins—tell me, how will your bigger dreams survive?”

Somewhere near me, someone snorted, but more people nodded slowly. The political student frowned, then, reluctantly, said, “So… we start with—”

“We start,” Mouse-tail said, “by insisting that Hu’s death be described scientifically, not morally. We start by demanding that any scheduling of pregabalin be public, transparent, evidence-based. We start by saying: ‘Don’t call us addicts because it’s convenient.’”

The crowd shifted. Words like “system” and “democratization” receded a step, replaced, for now, with “transparency,” “responsibility,” “clarity.”
It was a compromise, but not the kind the top planned. It was our compromise, moving the front line from “abstract institutions” to “synapse, receptor, label.”

A girl with a black ribbon and a pharmacology textbook under her arm came up to our blanket later, knelt, and whispered: “You mean Hu’s drug is… like what my grandmother takes for nerve pain?”

“Yes,” I said. “And no. Dose matters. Context matters. Intention matters.”

She looked up at me. “Will they say I’m an addict if my grandmother dies?”

I had no answer. So I handed her one of our leaflets instead.

That was the first night. We went back to campus at dawn, eyes burning. In the mirror of the dorm bathroom, my own pupils looked wrong: too big, too hopeful, too tired.

I told myself it was just lack of sleep. Pregabalin withdrawal. Caffeine.

But somewhere in there, a different chemical had begun to drip: belief.

四

The days blurred, but the dates burned into memory like dosage labels.

April 22nd: official memorial, black ties, wreaths. We stood outside the Great Hall with a carefully typed petition in triplicate: “Regarding Medication, Narrative, and Public Health.” Inside, they spoke of “outstanding leadership” and “sudden illness,” not one word of receptors, dosing, or stigma.

Our group was small, politely blocked by police cordons. The officer’s breath smelled faintly of cheap liquor and state cigarettes. He looked at the petition title and smirked.

“Drugs,” he said. “You want to talk about drugs today?”

“This is a memorial,” I said, too quickly. “For a man who was under medical care.”

“He died of his heart,” the officer said, as if quoting a line. “Do you have medical credentials to question that?”
He tapped his holster, not his badge. “Go back to your studies.”

They didn’t take the paper. That hurt more than if they’d torn it up.

Back at school, the argument spread: some said we were too narrow, too obsessed with molecules; others said we were the only ones talking about something actionable.

Between April 23rd and 25th, under the dull buzz of insects and propaganda speeches, “student autonomous associations” sprouted like weeds. Our own cluster became an odd branch: “Joint Research Group on Medication and Rights.”
We met at dusk in classrooms that smelled of chalk and disinfectant, scribbling with both fervor and tremor.

If you looked from outside, we were a bunch of pale, hollow-eyed kids obsessing over side effects and legal language. From inside, it felt like surgery without anesthesia.

ODWIKI, my old creation, should have been the heart of this. It had the most notes, the most cross-references, the most scars. But it also had a history now: stories of elitism, of my past pronouncements dividing “od experimenters” and “junkies,” of whispered arrogance. People shot me glances that were both reverent and hostile, the way addicts look at their first dealer.

Meanwhile FOW, Mouse-tail’s new invention, shimmered in the background: no central authority, no hierarchy, just a web of readers and translators, passing around Western harm reduction texts hand to hand.
They made me look like an old bureaucrat.

And hovering around us, like a slick shadow, was Dew Rain’s “Drug Encyclopedia”—his term, nauseatingly grand. He talked about “comprehensive documentation,” “bridging theory and practice,” but what he actually did was simple: he sold.

Moon Dust.

I first saw the stuff up close on April 24th, in a back corner of the dormitory laundry room. Little Cat had a capsule pinched between two fingers, examining the powder through the translucent shell.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“He says it’s a clean dissociative,” she said. “No hallucinations, no nausea, short action. Good for spiritual exploration.”

I took the capsule from her, rolled it in my palm. The powder clung strangely to the plastic, like it had too many fine particles.

“No ingredients list,” I said. “No dosing data. No animal studies. Just his pretty words.”

“You think I care about rats?” she said, smiling not really at me. “You think I care about my liver?”

Her voice clipped, then softened. “I care about the walls in my head. I want to see if they fall.”

I should have slapped it from her hand. Instead I opened my own pocket and felt the familiar bulge of my pregabalin blister.

“Trade you,” I said. “You want a wall taken down? Try this instead. At least I know where it hits.”

She laughed. “You think you can curate my madness, Senior?”

She swallowed the Moon Dust anyway.

Her pupils went glassy, her speech slowed then sped. For an hour she described seeing her childhood bedroom from the ceiling, except now it was flooded with a light that smelled like metal. Then she sobbed. Then she giggled. Then she slept.

The next day she didn’t remember much. She just said, “It was pure.”

I made her tea and said nothing. Inside me, something old and brittle cracked.

That night 55555 brought me a crumpled stack of papers, his fingers leaving ash smears on the margins.

“From a source,” he said. “Drug Encyclopedia internal chats. Do you want to read?”

I did.

五

It read like the minutes of a board meeting in hell.

The chats were handwritten copies—someone had transcribed them from torn notebook pages. No names, only nicknames, but the tone was unmistakable.

“—we can position Moon Dust as a ‘safer alternative’ to street drugs. Students feel better if it sounds academic.”

“—risk of dependency? Overestimated. They’re privileged kids, they can handle it.”

“—if we publish the formula, others will copy it. Better to keep it in-house. Scarcity builds prestige.”

And then, in a looping, almost childish hand I recognized as Dew Rain’s:

“I dream of building an empire of clean addiction. If they must be dependent, let them be dependent on our design, not the State’s.”

I read that line three times. My hand shook, from anger or too much caffeine, I couldn’t tell.

Behind it all ran a smaller thread, chilling:

“For the upcoming safety conference, we can send someone who speaks their language. Use the name ‘55555.’ They already associate it with caution. It will make them trust us.”

I looked up at 55555.

“They used your name?”

He nodded once, eyes flat. “Public Security held a ‘campus safety discussion’ two months ago. Someone went in my place, made a grand show of ‘exposing the drug abusers among us,’ promised cooperation, asked for leniency for ‘one responsible lab.’ Guess who.”

“Dew Rain,” I said, though it felt more like vomiting than speaking.

“And Chicken Brother coached him,” 55555 said. “Told him how to flatter, when to frown, what buzzwords to use. I have that part too, but only in hearsay.”

On April 25th, I sat in our old ODWIKI room with the chat copies spread like autopsy photos. Mouse-tail paced at the window, Little Cat lay on the table tracing the lines with one finger as if they were veins.

“If we expose this,” Mouse-tail said, “we blow up one of the biggest drug sources on campus, we defend our credibility, we strike back at the narrative that we’re all the same. But—”

“But we also gift the authorities a neat package,” I said. “They’ll say: ‘See? Self-confession. A drug ring in your ranks.’”

My heart pounded. Pregabalin doesn’t do that. This was the other drug: fear.

55555 lit another cigarette with shaking hands. “Maybe we don’t have a choice. If we let them keep using my name, they’ll drag ODWIKI and everyone else down with them.”

“In seven days,” he added, “they’ll run their big editorial. We can’t let Dew Rain define us before we define him.”

“How do you know it’s seven days?” Little Cat asked.

He gave her a look that said: stop being naive. She pouted, her bipolar swings click-click-clicking behind her eyes.

So on April 26th’s dawn, before the big editorial, before the loudspeakers, we did something we had always said we would never do: we went public.

We printed Dew Rain’s words on thin, cheap paper—just the parts about fake identities, the denied formula, the dream of an “addiction empire.” We left out the dosing details, the barn of names, the half-formed recipes—that wasn’t for the State.

At seven in the morning, those sheets hung across campus like a second skin: on classroom doors, on canteen walls, outside the dean’s office.
A small heading in my hand:

“Statement on Responsibility in Campus Drug Research.”

Sub-heading:

“We will not be your cover.”

By ten, Dew Rain’s face had gone from pale to white to politically colored. He stormed across the courtyard toward us at noon, voice half a pitch higher than usual, spitting words like “slander,” “betrayal,” “self-righteous.”

We debated under the locust trees. Or tried to. His followers shouted, Mouse-tail quoted Western harm reduction principles, I tried to lay out the distinction between anonymous notes and public medicine. Students ringed us, smelling blood and adrenaline.

In the end, it wasn’t us that silenced him. It was the department office that summoned him in the afternoon, the Party branch that interviewed him for three hours, the official notice pinned that evening on the bulletin board:
“Student XX is under investigation for involvement in unauthorized distribution of psychoactive substances. During this period, he is prohibited from organizing or speaking at any public campus event.”

Seven days. Suspension, gag order, whatever you want to call it. The equivalent of banning someone’s voice.

As night fell, the loudspeakers crackled again, and the April 26th editorial poured over us like old dye in new water:

“Resolutely oppose turmoil … a handful of people under foreign influence … using issues such as ‘drug freedom’ to mislead the masses … decadent Western ‘liberalization’…”

We stood in the dark courtyard, my damp hands tight around a cigarette I didn’t remember lighting, listening as they bundled us together with whatever phantom villains they needed.

“Congratulations,” Mouse-tail whispered, bitterly amused. “They noticed us.”

Little Cat shivered next to me. “Senior, what have we done?”

“Exactly what we said we would,” I answered. “We refused to be his excuse. Now we’ll see if we become their excuse instead.”

I went back to my bed and swallowed two pregabalin capsules instead of one. “For the nerves,” I muttered, lying to no one.

Sleep came like a reluctant overdose.

六

April 27th was the first time I saw a hundred thousand people move like one organism.

From the campus gates to the Square, it was a river of banners, armbands, and cheap plastic megaphones. Some placards still carried the old political phrases—“Oppose Corruption,” “Demand Reform”—but new ones had appeared overnight, in handwriting that shook with both anger and caffeine:

“Don’t Call Treatment ‘Abuse’”
“Science, Not Stigma”
“Truth in Our Blood, Truth in Your Laws”

Our little troop marched near the middle, half-proud, half-terrified, our own banner awkward but clear:
“Joint Group for Medication Knowledge and Rights.”

I had wanted something more elegant. 55555 had insisted on plain words: “If you get too poetic, they’ll say we’re on drugs,” he said, without irony.

From the sidewalks, shopkeepers and old people watched, some clapping, some frowning. Children pointed at our hand-drawn serotonin molecules and giggled. One taxi driver shouted, “You’re all addicts!” His passenger smacked him on the head.

Near Xidan, a thin journalist with a notebook approached me, his lapel pin discrete. “What exactly are you asking for?” he asked, pen poised.

I straightened—old habit, old arrogance. “We want a rational drug policy,” I said, tasting each word. “We want the death of a senior leader to be described by doctors, not by moralists. We want educational materials about medication risks, not rumors. We want to distinguish between use, misuse, and dependency, instead of calling everything ‘poison.’”

He blinked. “You sound like Western articles,” he said, reflexively suspicious.

“I sound like someone who’s seen too many friends misdose in the dark,” I replied. “If I must plagiarize, I will plagiarize from those who didn’t let their fear write their pharmacology.”

He scribbled something. It would later appear in an abbreviated, sanitized form, stripped of receptor names and pregnant with innuendo, in a city paper. But for that afternoon, the words were at least said.

At the Square, we set up again—blanket, pamphlets, makeshift “consultation corner.” Behind us, the monument rose, scaffolding of history we pretended to stand on.

A boy from out of town came, eyes red-rimmed. “They say I’m an addict,” he confessed, voice breaking. “I took over-the-counter cough medicine during exams to stay awake. Now my parents want to send me to a labor camp. Can you… certify that I’m not evil?”

“I can’t certify anything,” I said. “But I can tell you your brain chemistry doesn’t know ideology. It knows doses, frequencies, receptors.”

He laughed, then sobbed. Little Cat pressed a tissue into his hand. Mouse-tail slipped him a one-page printout: “DXM: Risks and Myths.”

Every time we tried to speak purely in receptor terms, some political word would slip in. Every time someone shouted a slogan about “democracy,” some drug name would answer from the other side of the Square. It was chaotic, real, impure.

We felt, absurdly, like we were winning something.

That illusion lasted exactly ten days.

七

In early May, the weather turned, and so did the tone.

On May 4th, Youth Day, the Square pulsed again. Official youth organizations played their rituals; we played ours. Students from other provinces arrived with their own banners, their own histories.
We stood under a hastily drawn sign: “Medication, Not Demonization.”

Midway through a speech about “the responsibility of youth to speak truth,” a rumor rippled through the crowd: foreign journalists were in the upper floors of the nearby hotels, binoculars and cameras trained on the sea of banners.

“Perfect,” Mouse-tail murmured. “Let them see we’re not all chanting the same words.”

On impulse—or was it the mixture of caffeine and last night’s DXM?—I climbed onto a truck bed, grabbed a megaphone, and did what I had promised myself I wouldn’t: I spoke not just as an analyst, but as a judge.

“We are not saints,” I shouted, as microphones and gawkers turned. “Half the people standing at this corner right now have some form of psychoactive substance in their blood. Some legal, some not. Some prescribed, some improvised. We are not pure. But neither is your history.”

Murmurs. A wave of discomfort. I pressed on.

“They want to pretend that the only clean bodies are sober bodies, and the only sober bodies are obedient bodies. That a man given pregabalin for pain died because he was morally weak, not because he was ill.”
I gestured toward the monument. “We are here to say: knowledge of molecules is not treason. Wanting to understand how amantadine or memantine interacts with one’s brain is not ‘foreign infiltration.’”

I felt my mind stretch—pregabalin’s soft fingers digging in, my own old irritation rising. And then, like a reflex, like a long-unused muscle snapping, I slipped.

“And if any of you,” I added, voice sharp, “think you can build your own little drug empires on the backs of the naive, hiding formulas, faking safety, flattering the State with fake confessions—hear me: you’re not researchers. You’re pimps with test tubes.”

The crowd winced. They knew exactly who I meant.

That night, back on campus, the summons came. University leaders, Party branch, stern faces, ashtrays full.

“You are talented,” they said, condescending and cold. “But you have used your talent to insult fellow students, to promote dangerous thinking, to blur the line between scientific inquiry and abuse.”

They slid a typed paper across the table: a disciplinary notice. “For the next seven days,” it said, “you are prohibited from speaking at any rallies, appearing at the Square as a group organizer, or issuing written statements under any student organization’s name.”

Seven days. It could have been a reprieve. A forced detox. A chance to rest, to think.

Instead, rage coiled in my gut like a swallowed snake.

Back in what was left of the ODWIKI room, 55555 tried to reason. “Let it go,” he said. “For a week. Mouse-tail and I can speak. Let your name cool down.”

But my pride was an old addiction, and I had overdosed on it for years.

“If I don’t call them out,” I said, “who will? You saw what Dew Rain wrote. You saw whose name he used. And Chicken Brother… He’s already turning the ring into a circus.”

“He’s on the Square every night,” Little Cat chimed in. “Handing out free capsules of God-knows-what to drifters and kids who can barely read the dosages. He says it’s ‘solidarity.’”

“He says everything like a slogan,” I muttered. “Under the influence of his own press releases.”

I should have stopped there. But I didn’t.

In those “silent seven days,” I found ways to make myself heard anyway: feeding lines to younger students, sliding handwritten notes into speeches, letting ODWIKI’s old draft leaflets “accidentally” circulate with certain paragraphs highlighted.
The ban on my mouth did nothing to my pen.

And further away, beyond my suspension, a more brutal blow was already being prepared.

八

It was around May 8th when ODWIKI died, not from overdose, but from paperwork.

I remember the day mostly by the heat: the kind that makes chalk dust stick to your throat. We were in afternoon “group discussion”—half about protest logistics, half about who owed whom cigarettes—when the campus loudspeaker cut in mid-sentence and called my name, 55555’s, and two others to the office.

Mouse-tail trailed behind us, not summoned but curious, like a cat.

In the small conference room, the dean and a stranger from “higher up” sat stiffly. On the table lay a folder bulging with photocopies. I recognized the handwriting on half of them.

“These materials,” the stranger said, “were submitted to us anonymously. Internal memos, lecture drafts, so-called ‘harm reduction manuals.’” He tapped the pages. “Under the heading ‘ODWIKI.’”

He read choice phrases with theatrical disapproval:

“—describes in detail the dosage ranges of several non-scheduled psychoactive substances for ‘recreational purposes.’”
“—discusses ‘ideal settings’ for altered states, clearly inciting…”
“—mentions combining memantine with other drugs for ‘enhanced exploration.’”

He looked at me over his glasses. “You call this science?”

“It’s context,” I said. “We describe risks. We prevent blind overdoses. We have saved—”

He cut me off with a tired wave. “If you wanted to save lives, you would turn in names to us, not write manuals for them.”

55555’s jaw twitched. He opened his mouth, closed it again, knowing that anything he said could be twisted.

“The university has decided,” the dean said, flipping to a crisp typed page, “to suspend all activities under the name ‘ODWIKI.’ The room you have been using will be reassigned. Your materials will be sealed for review. You may continue your studies as individuals, but you will no longer organize under that title.”

It was an execution disguised as administrative tidying.

Later, we would learn that the anonymous informer had a Japanese passport stamp and a tendency to show off imported triazolam and flunitrazepam: Edward. He had combed through our old notes, looking not for truth but for ammunition, to polish his own image as “clean” reformer.

As we walked out of the office, Mouse-tail couldn’t help himself. “So now,” he said, “the only legitimate voice on campus medication will be those who have never taken any?”

“Or those who hide it better,” I muttered.

That evening, in the now-doomed ODWIKI room, we held a wake.

We took down the charts, slowly. We packed the handwritten pamphlets into cardboard boxes that smelled of mildew and regret. Little Cat sat cross-legged on the floor, rolling a tiny ball of wall paint that had chipped off, as if it contained meaning.

“This was your child,” 55555 said to me, not unkindly. “I’m sorry.”

“I abandoned it once already,” I said. “Maybe this is punishment.”

Mouse-tail slammed a fist into the wall. “No. This is what happens when we spend more energy attacking each other than watching them. While we bickered about Moon Dust and titles, someone like Edward took meticulous notes on our every mistake.”

He turned to me, eyes bright and cruel. “Are you happy now, Super Goto? Your perfect definitions? Your careful boundary between ‘OD experimenters’ and ‘real addicts’? The State just lumped you together anyway. Congratulations.”

My throat closed. Pregabalin doesn’t make you cry. Humiliation does.

That night, unable to sleep, I wandered back to the Square alone.

It was quieter now, between surges. Tents had begun to appear—makeshift shelters that looked more like a music festival than a political protest. Students played guitars, whispered, kissed, argued about everything.
In one corner, under a dim light, someone had set up a “drug knowledge wall”: fragments of our banned ODWIKI notes copied by hand, tacked up with thumbtacks.

“Who wrote this?” a freshman whispered to her friend, pointing to a line in my old “Overdose Introduction”:

“We don’t take drugs because we are evil. We take them because we are in pain, or curious, or lonely, or defiant. The molecule does not care. The policy should.”

Her friend shrugged. “Some graduate. He left, I heard.”

I stood there, feeling like a ghost at my own funeral.

九

The middle of May smells, in my memory, of sweat, damp cardboard, and incense.

On May 13th, they began the “hunger strike.” We—the so-called “drug group”—couldn’t quite mimic that purity. Our bodies were already in complicated negotiations: with pregabalin, memantine, benzodiazepines, stimulants, banged-up livers.

So we adapted.

“We will not stop our necessary medications,” Mouse-tail said at our meeting, his tone both defiant and practical. “But we will cease all purely recreational doses. No extra DXM ‘for fun,’ no party LSD, no random sleeping pills for ‘interesting dreams.’ Strictly therapeutic or nothing.”

“Who decides what’s therapeutic?” Little Cat asked, not entirely joking.

“You do,” I said. “And then we judge you behind your back.”

There was laughter, weak but warm.

We also did something more symbolic: each of us wrote, on a single sheet, our exact drug intake of the past week—names, doses, intervals—and pinned it to the side of our tent with the title:

“Transparency Begins In My Blood.”

Students passing by stopped, read, blushed. Some wrote questions in the margins:
“Is 75mg pregabalin really that much?”
“What’s the difference between memantine and amantadine?”
“Is 10mg diazepam addictive if used once a week?”

We replied with pens, arrows, footnotes. It felt like an insane hybrid of confession booth and clinic.

Meanwhile, the main hunger strike intensified. Kids barely out of adolescence lay on borrowed mattresses, lips cracked, chanting hoarsely. The leadership made speeches about “sacrifice,” “the conscience of the nation.” Television cameras from abroad zoomed in on gaunt faces; local television zoomed in on official visits, careful not to show the crying.

On the 15th, the foreign guest arrived. Gorbachev. His name drifted over the Square like a word in another language that happened to rhyme with ours.

So did foreign reporters—pale, sunburned, sweating in shirtsleeves, notebooks ready.

One tall European journalist approached our tent, his interpreter stumbling over terms.

“They say,” he began, “that there are… how to say… ‘drug elements’ in your movement. That your demands are not only political but… chemical.”

Mouse-tail grinned. “True,” he said. “Democracy is too abstract. We prefer molecules.”

I stepped in, more serious. “We are not pushing drugs,” I said. “We are pushing knowledge. We are asking this country to stop using the word ‘drug’ as a curse, to distinguish between a patient’s pill and a smuggler’s powder.”

The interpreter struggled with “smuggler’s powder,” turned it into something less poetic.

The journalist scribbled, fascinated. “So you are… a kind of… drug policy reform movement?”

“If you must put it that way,” I said, “yes.”

He wrote. Later, some Hong Kong paper would describe the Square as “half political rally, half psychedelic fair.”
We became, in their imagination, a Chinese Woodstock of pills and banners.
It made the older professors vomit in rage.

At the same time, news from within the city grew darker.

Rumors of “riot,” of “turmoil,” of troops moving closer. An internal notice, whispered from faculty office to student ears: “Martial law is being considered.”

Our little corner responded in the only way we knew: with more notes.

We decided to hold a memorial on May 16th, not for a political martyr, but for one of our own: Spring-Wind.

He had died three years before, taking too much ayahuasca brewed in some dorm bathroom, chasing visions he had read about in translated ethnographic texts, without a sitter, without a plan. We had been too ignorant then to help.

Under the Monument to the People’s Heroes, we placed a small, discreet cardboard sign:

“In memory of Spring-Wind (196x–1986), who died not of drugs, but of ignorance.”

We taped to the monument photocopies of his old notes—careful, luminous observations about beta-carbolines and DMT—and the last line from his notebook:

“If I black out tonight, it will be either because I am too weak or because the dose is too strong. Either way, it means I miscalculated something.”

Students who had never heard his name took black pens and drew spirals on their hands. Some cut out little paper badges with his nickname and pinned them to their shirts. For two days, nearly every second or third person in our circle wore his face in pen lines over their breast.

For a brief time, it felt like we had rebuilt something: a shared memory, a banner of grief not immediately kneecapped by ideology.

Underneath that, though, other currents ran.

On the fringe of the tents, got-word vendors, younger kids, and rootless men from the city began to move in, attracted by the free food, the adrenaline, the sense that something was happening. Chicken Brother was in his element.

He strutted along the tent rows, long hair greasy, eyes shining, pockets bulging with little vials and foil packets. To insecure freshmen, to bored apprentices, he whispered:

“Real courage isn’t chanting slogans. It’s dropping the walls in your head. Try this 4-HO-MET microdose—just enough to make the world bleed color. Or this DPT—just a pinch and you’ll see gods. Or if you want something smoother, I have PEA blends. Designed by chemistry students, not gangsters.”

Mouse-tail seethed. “He’s turning the Square into a carnival,” he said. “He’s recruiting people who don’t care about policy, only about getting high.”

“He’s always been a romantic,” Little Cat said, half-mocking, half-envious. “He calls it ‘sacramental exploration.’”

“He calls amantadine-induced psychosis a vision quest,” I muttered. “Tell that to his MRI.”

We should have confronted him then, publicly. Instead, we delayed. There were bigger things, we thought. There were always bigger things.

The bigger thing arrived on May 19th.

十

That night, the top came to the bottom.

After days of rumors, the motorcade’s headlights stabbed into the Square like two lines of slow lightning. Loudspeakers crackled.
The Prime Minister. The General Secretary. Names we had only seen in print were suddenly flesh under our weak lights.

The leaders climbed the steps of the Monument, flanked by guards. The hunger-strikers looked like ghosts laid out on borrowed sheets. Cameras whirred, foreign and domestic.

I stood at the back of the crowd, just close enough to see faces, just far enough to avoid being on any official film. My pockets held a single blister of pregabalin, two memantine tablets, and a trembling hand.

The Prime Minister’s face was hard. His voice even. He spoke of “misled youth,” of “turmoil,” of “stability.” Beside him, the General Secretary’s eyes shone wetly. He held the microphone with a kind of hopeless kindness I had only seen in doctors who know the surgery will fail.

“We came too late,” he said to the students on the mattresses. “We are old. You are still young. You must live. Don’t starve yourselves.”

His voice cracked. It wasn’t acting—not entirely.

Around me, shoulders shook. Some students cried because they believed him. Others cried because they knew this was a farewell.

I felt my heart do something I didn’t have a receptor map for. For a second, I believed, absurdly, that a man’s tears could dissolve the orders already written.

After they left, the Square buzzed like the inside of a beehive that’s just been struck.

Some said, “We should withdraw now. We’ve made our point. They came.”
Others said, “That was a performance. Tomorrow they will send troops.”

In our little knot, Mouse-tail spoke first.

“The visit means they are divided,” he said. “Mixed signals. That’s exactly when we must be clearest.” He pulled out a new draft: “Six Points on Drug Policy and Public Health.”

I glanced at it. It was everything we had always wanted—ban on moralizing language in official documents, creation of an independent pharmacovigilance committee, transparent listing of all scheduled substances and reasons.

“You’re delirious,” 55555 said. “No one at that level cares about memantine scheduling right now. They’re wondering if they can hold on to their own chairs.”

“So we show them,” Mouse-tail said, obstinately, “that drug policy is not a side issue. It’s about who controls pain, who defines sanity. You think they’ll allow democracy if they aren’t even challenged on that?”

His idealism was like a stimulant—sharp, insomnia-inducing, always available. I envied, and resented, that he could still metabolize it.

Later, around midnight, as we walked back toward the campus in a slow, hungry file, a whisper caught up with us:
“Martial law. Tomorrow. Official announcement.”

Someone laughed, thin and high. “They wouldn’t dare.”

I put a membrane between myself and the fact with a familiar motion: a capsule—no, two—pushed down my throat, no water. Pregabalin, my second spine.

“Don’t,” Little Cat said, half-asleep and severe. “We said only necessary doses.”

“This is necessary,” I said. “Or I’ll hit someone.”

She shrugged. “Maybe someone needs hitting.”

In the dorm room, the glow-in-the-dark clock said 3:12 AM as I lay awake, mind both sedated and spinning.

I thought: They will call us worthless junkies and noble idealists with the same mouth, depending on which line needs selling.
I thought: We have spent more time labeling each other than preparing for batons.

I thought: I have done all of this—lectures, leaflets, late nights—and I still can’t reliably stop a girl like Little Cat from taking whatever pretty powder is offered.

Sleep did not come. Only the heavy grey of the hour before loudspeakers.

十一

On May 20th, the morning after the leaders’ nocturnal pilgrimage, the announcement came like a stone dropped in dirty water.

“…from today, in order to maintain capital stability,” the radio droned, “a decision has been made to implement martial law in parts of the city…”

It sounded almost calm. They always sound calm when they pick up the gun.

Within hours, the first convoys were spotted at the city’s edge: green trucks, helmets, young faces under metal. If you zoomed in far enough, you would see that some of those conscripts’ pupils were dilated too—fatigue, fear, maybe sedatives. But from where we stood, they were just an iron line creeping closer.

The Square reacted by instinct: barricades, human and wooden. Buses parked sideways, makeshift roadblocks with cobblestones ripped up by soft scholar hands. The political leadership spoke of “nonviolent resistance,” “the power of the people’s hearts.”
Chicken Brother spoke of something else.

He gathered a cluster under an underpass near the Third Ring, pupils wild.

“They’re going to hit us with shields, batons, maybe worse,” he said. “If you go at them with bare nerves, you’ll break. But if your consciousness is untethered—if you feel no fear—then you can stand as long as their bullets.”

He held up small glass vials. “We have stimulants—methylphenidate powder, homemade derivatives. We have amantadine and memantine in higher doses to cut the sharp edge of pain. We can blend something that makes you feel like your body is not so fragile.”

He spoke like a preacher. Some students listened like congregation, especially the ones who had never used before and wanted to compress experience into one long, bright night.

I grabbed his arm. “You’ll kill them,” I hissed. “Or worse—make them kill without fully knowing it.”

He shrugged me off. “You wanted to free people from fear of drugs,” he sneered. “Now that they might use them to fight, you chicken out?”

“There’s a difference between knowing what’s in your veins,” I said, “and using it as armor plating.”

Mouse-tail intervened, voice sharp: “We reject any call to weaponize drugs. We are here to dismantle stigma, not to invent a new kind of child soldier.”

“You can stay in your tent and write essays,” Chicken Brother spat. “We’ll be at the barricades.”

He was as high on ideals as on his own stock. That made him more dangerous than any dealer I had ever known.

Back on campus, another blow landed in my own narrow life.

In a cramped classroom repurposed as “movement coordination office,” a dozen students were arguing logistics. Which faculty to send to which intersection. How many to guard the library. Where to stockpile water.
In the middle of it, an ODD member—one of Chicken Brother’s quieter lieutenants—raised a hand.

“On the topic of strategy,” he began mildly, “I’d like to suggest something. For students who are already addicted or already using dissociatives, a carefully tapered memantine regime might actually improve their cognitive flexibility…”

He was speaking carefully, almost medically. It was the kind of thought I myself might have entertained, in a journal article, with caveats.

But I saw the ODD armband on his sleeve, and something snapped.

“Of course you’d say that,” I cut in. “Your whole organization is a guided tour of drug-induced psychosis.”

Heads turned. Mouse-tail shot me a warning look: not now.

I did not—or could not—stop.

“You talk about memantine ‘regimes’,” I went on, voice rising. “Do you even understand NMDA receptor pharmacodynamics? Do you know what uncompetitive antagonism does at high doses over days? Or are you just parroting something you half-read in a smuggled abstract?”

The boy’s face reddened. “I’ve read—”

“You’ve read nothing,” I snapped. “You and your leader toss amantadine and memantine like candy at people who can’t even pronounce ‘glutamate,’ and when they start dissociating so hard they forget their own names, you call it ‘enlightenment.’”

Somewhere in there, I stopped speaking in receptors and started speaking in filth.
Words I’d buried under technical language bubbled up: “parasites,” “junkies,” “idiots,” words I had always claimed to fight against when they came from officials.

People winced. Some, who had been humiliated by me in smaller gatherings before, looked up with a flash of something like vindication. Finally, the great harm reductionist reveals his own contempt.

Mouse-tail stood. “Enough,” he said. “We can criticize methods without demeaning people.”

I laughed too loudly. “Coming from the man who thinks he’s the only one who’s read a Western journal?”

The room fractured. ODD members stiffened; FOW supporters bristled; unaffiliated students shrank back, scribbling mental notes: Goto, arrogant; Goto, ally of no one.

After the meeting, the ODD boy filed a complaint. Others added their names, quietly, late at night: people I had snapped at, corrected too harshly, dismissed.
Behind them, Chicken Brother, seeing his chance, knocked on doors, whispering: “If you want Goto gone, now’s the moment. He’s a liability to the cause. Always was.”

On May 25th, the verdict came: a thicker, harsher paper than before.

“For repeated instances of verbal abuse, incitement of unsafe drug discourse, and disruption of unity,” it read, “student XX is removed from all positions in student organizations, barred from representing the university in any activity, and issued a major demerit in his file.”

It was the academic equivalent of permanent deletion.

Everyone who had ever signed a complaint got a copy of the notice. They knew, in that instant, that they had pushed the button together.

In the Square, whispers began: “Goto has gone too far.” “He used to be about science; now he just screams.”

The narrative solidified overnight. And as if on cue, some bright mind decided it must have been Mouse-tail and Edward who engineered my fall. It made sense: I had sparred with Mouse-tail in public; Edward had a history of, well, documentation.
The fact that the original spark came from ODD was conveniently smudged.

I walked around the campus that evening feeling like a ghost again, but this time a ghost everyone could see.

Little Cat found me on the sports field bleachers, chain-smoking.

“They took your badges,” she said, almost gently. “But they can’t erase your notes.”

“They can seal the room,” I said. “They have.”

She produced, from her pocket, a folded piece of paper. My handwriting, photocopied: a paragraph from “On Stigma and Overdose.”

“I carry you with me,” she said. “Even if you don’t want me to.”

Her pupils were different that night—slightly narrowed, mouth too relaxed. Something benzo-like, or maybe just exhaustion. I did not ask.

From the city’s edge, the faintest echo of engines could be heard. The troops were inching closer, patient as an IV drip.

十二

By late May, the Square had stabilized into something that resembled a small, mad city.

Tents in neat rows, banners crisscrossing like laundry lines, study circles and singing circles and first-aid corners marked with red crosses drawn in marker on old shirts.
There was even a “library”: a table piled with borrowed books—Marx, Lenin, psychology texts, pharmacology manuals, foreign harm reduction zines smuggled and copied.

Our medication corner had shrunk. With ODWIKI banned and my name blackened, people came more furtively. Some still slipped me questions at night: “If I stop diazepam suddenly, will I seize?” “Is 4-HO-MET less toxic than LSD?”
I answered in low tones, the way one speaks in a clinic behind the curtain.

FOW, on the other hand, was flourishing. Mouse-tail’s “decentralization” meant they never lost a room—just scattered and reconvened. Their hand-copied translations of Western articles passed from hand to hand like forbidden leaflets: “Safe Injecting Practices,” “Why Prohibition Fails,” “Decriminalization Case Studies.”

He basked in a moral high that made him intolerable and magnetic.
He criticized ODD’s “drug heroism,” criticized Dew Rain’s profiteering even from beyond the grave, criticized me without naming me: “Certain early authors thought they could maintain respectability by drawing lines between ‘respectable users’ and ‘junkies.’ Today, look at their files.”

Edward preened in the background, always ready to supply an extra citation, an extra rumor, an extra reason why his particular path—quiet, embedded cleaning of his own record—was superior.

ODD, unsurprisingly, doubled down. Chicken Brother opened his “tent” larger, recruiting more idle youths, more city drifters. He told them the movement was “about expanding consciousness,” not mere “policy.”
They booed official speeches, cheered when he proposed getting high in front of soldiers to “show fearlessness.”

The rest of the movement, those whose only drug was idealism and cafeteria noodles, watched this tug-of-war with increasing unease. To them, we were all “the drug people”—FOW, ODD, ODWIKI’s ghosts, all under one blurry label.

On May 26th, during a particularly tense mass meeting, a proposal was floated by some medic students: “If the army comes, we must respond nonviolently. No weapons, no aggression. The world is watching.”

An FOW representative—one of Mouse-tail’s sharper disciples—stood and endorsed it, adding pointedly: “And no using psychoactive substances as weapons or shields. We must show we are rational, not intoxicated.”

Chicken Brother smirked. “Rational,” he repeated. “Rational people get run over by tanks with very rational bones.”

He raised his voice. “What’s the use of your Western articles if you still kneel when they point guns? They banned your group”—he nodded vaguely at me—“because you followed rules. Maybe it’s time we stopped playing doctor and started playing… something else.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. My words had lost some of their weight, like old currency after a devaluation.

That night, in a side alley off Chang’an Avenue, a rumor brushed my ear: Dew Rain had died.

He’d been quiet since his second ban. The investigation, the public shaming, the collapse of his “Encyclopedia” had stripped him of both money and meaning.
Some said he took a handful of barbiturates—Pentobarbital stolen from a lab drawer—and washed it down with cheap baijiu in a rented room.
Others said he’d left a note, crumpled and half-burned, saying: “If addiction is empire, then I abdicate.”

Hospitals are discreet in this city. So are morgues. Within hours, security personnel visited his dorm, quietly packed his things, told his roommates to keep calm and carry on. Officially, he “left to recuperate in the countryside.”

In our circles, the truth—messy, ungrammatical—spread faster.

Little Cat cried, surprising me. “He was an idiot,” she said through tears. “But he was our idiot.”

Mouse-tail was colder. “His dream was to build a throne of dependency,” he said. “Now he died on the floor beneath it. There is justice in chemistry.”

I said nothing. I could not escape the bitter symmetry: Hu, my mythic “patient,” dead by pregabalin; Dew Rain, my real enemy, dead by downers; Spring-Wind, our first martyr, dead by plant alkaloids.
Everywhere I looked, molecules trailed ghosts behind them.

On May 28th, an improvised memorandum circulated among “key” students: a plan to negotiate an orderly partial withdrawal from the Square, to keep some moral victory while avoiding outright slaughter.
Mouse-tail was torn. FOW’s dreams of reform needed alive bodies. ODD scoffed: “They want to end it in a whimper.”

I was no longer “key” in any document, but people still asked my opinion.

“You’ve seen overdose,” one of the political organisers said. “How does it end when someone ignores every warning and keeps taking more?”

“With a dull thud,” I said. “Not with fireworks.”

He didn’t understand. How could he? The only drug he’d ever known was patriotism.

十三

The first days of June felt like waiting in a hospital corridor while the surgeon refuses to come out.

On June 1st, children marched with paper flowers in some other part of the city, preserved for television. On the edges of the Third Ring, soldiers sat in their trucks, sweating, smoking, waiting. Between them: us, our banners fraying, our nerves rawed.

Rumors rioted: some said martial law had been revoked; some said the army refused to move against the people; others said Special Units had been authorized to “clear obstacles by any means.”

In our little chemical canton, new ideas took on darker colors.

I heard of a meeting in an ODD tent where someone proposed making “sleep bombs”: glass bottles filled with gasoline, solvent, and crushed up high-dose sedatives. The brilliant theory: when it explodes near troops, they inhale the powder, get drowsy, lower their guns.

It was as stupid as it was cruel. Nothing works that fast. Dose, dispersion, pulmonary absorption—it was fantasy. But in the tight circle of a tent lit by a single candle, fantasy can sound like strategy.

FOW issued a stern little leaflet—typed on some borrowed machine, hand-distributed: “We oppose any attempt to weaponize psychoactives. Drugs are not bullets. To use them as such is to murder our own cause.”

Edward smugly signed his name to the bottom.

Chicken Brother laughed when he saw it. “You think the tanks will respect your purity?” he shouted in our direction one evening. “They will flatten you whether you are on LSD or reading Lenin. At least give them a trip to remember.”

He was half-joking. Only half.

In a quieter corner, I saw something that made my stomach drop more than any alcohol could: a small knot of younger students divvying up blotter squares, whispering, “If we drop this before they come, we won’t be afraid.”

“Or you’ll be so afraid you can’t move,” I said, stepping in. “Set and setting. You’ve read nothing and you want to trip in a warzone?”

“We trust you,” one of them said, wide-eyed. “You know dosage. Protect us.”

I wanted to say: I can’t even protect myself.

Instead I confiscated half the blotters, tore them to shreds, threw them in a ditch. They would still find enough to do damage, somewhere else.

On June 3rd, the day thickened. Reports came in: troops moving again, this time with real urgency. Buses on fire in the western districts. Stones and arguments, both thrown.

Near dusk, the main organizers called a mass meeting on the Monument steps. Some argued to stay; others to leave, regroup, live to fight in smaller ways. Sound systems shorted out; voices cracked.

I stood at the back, among the dismissed and the cynical, half-listening. My own heart had already left and stayed, simultaneously.

Little Cat nudged my shoulder. She looked thin, eyes too bright.

“Senior,” she said, “if we die tonight, we’ll be in your footnotes.”

“That’s not comforting,” I said.

She smiled. “You taught us receptors. You can’t skip the part where the receptor is shot.”

Night fell like a curtain. Behind it, engines revved.

十四

I will not lie: the first gunshot I heard, I thought it was a firecracker.

Years of New Year habits die hard. Only when the second, then the third cracked out, in a jagged pattern that had nothing festive in it, did my body understand. My mind lagged behind, busy cataloguing: caliber, distance, probable muzzle velocity. Old textbooks, inappropriate.

Somewhere near Muxidi, they said, people were already dying. We heard it second-hand, third-hand, over student messengers panting on bicycles, through transistor radios flicking between foreign stations and static.

I was near the southern edge of the Square when the first armored vehicles appeared in the flame-tinged distance. They looked like something from a war film—unreal, until you saw the faces behind the slits.

Our barricades—buses, benches, human chains—were laughable against steel. Still, people threw their bodies at them. Some climbed on top, waving flags. Others hurled bottles: some gasoline-only, some the ill-fated “sleep bombs,” which did nothing but release sickly sweet fumes when they shattered.

In a side street, I saw a boy I vaguely recognized from a meeting—one of Chicken Brother’s—tear open a small paper packet and fling the powder into the air toward a phalanx of advancing troops, shouting, “Let them see our colors!”

The night wind shifted, carried a white translucent cloud back into our own ranks. Students coughed, stumbled, eyes watering. Someone screamed, “‘It’s gas!’” Others tripped over each other in blind panic harder than any hallucinogen could induce.

“That’s not LSD,” I muttered. “Probably just flour. Or something worse.” My brain insisted on categorization even then.

Closer to the center, the troops began what someone later called “clearing the Square.” That phrase sounds hygienic. There was nothing clean about it.

They advanced in lines, shields up. Batons swung, riflebuts slammed. Occasionally, the crack of live rounds punctuated the dull thuds. Whether they shot into the air, into legs, into chests—each story differs, each memory argues with another.

I saw a boy fall three meters from me, leg twisted wrong, blood spreading in a stain. His hand clenched a half-chewed stimulant tablet. His pupils were huge; his pain delayed.

A girl with a red armband tried to shield a box of leaflets with her own body; a soldier knocked her sideways. Her leaflets—our leaflets—about “scheduling transparency” and “safe dosage” scattered into a puddle, ink running, words dissolving into vague black.

I saw, in a blur, Chicken Brother jump onto a toppled bicycle, arms spread, shouting something about “history” and “eternity,” high on a cocktail of amantadine, methcathinone, and pure manic grandiosity. Someone tackled him before a bullet did. He disappeared into the crush.

Mouse-tail, somewhere near the monument, tried to organize an orderly retreat. “Leave in groups!” he shouted. “Protect the weak! No pushing!” His voice cracked into a cough. He’d been on self-made stimulants for days.

I moved like a man underwater, body half-anaesthetized by pregabalin, heart hammering with adrenaline. I grabbed arms, pulled people away from batons, yelled “Left, left!” even when I wasn’t sure where “left” led.

At one point, a soldier swung the butt of his rifle at my head. I ducked just in time; it grazed my shoulder instead, a bloom of pain that felt almost abstract.

Our tent—it had been our pharmacy, our confessional—was trampled, then burned. I watched, from a crouch behind a barricade, as our pinned-up “transparency” sheets curled and blackened. My own drug dosages vanished in flame before any archivist could twist them.

Sometime after midnight, an order filtered through the chaos: evacuate the Square. Leave, or be smashed.

Some left in ragged lines, singing broken songs. Some lay down and refused to move, had to be dragged. Some argued, insisted on martyrdom, then flinched at the next burst of gunfire.

I found Little Cat again near the edge, one side of her face streaked with blood—hers or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell.

She laughed when she saw me. “I thought you’d evaporated.”

“I’m not soluble,” I said. It sounded stupid, but she laughed anyway.

“Did we win?” she asked.

I looked around: the burning tents, the advancing shields, the scattered leaflets, the flicker of foreign camera flashes at a distance, the vague shapes of bodies being carried away on doorboards.

“We changed the composition of the air,” I said. “That’s something.”

She nodded, as if that made sense. Her pupils were pin-pricks now; maybe she’d taken something to come down.

We joined a loose column shuffling down Chang’an. On the sidewalks, older residents watched, some weeping silently, others just staring. A woman handed me a thermos lid of hot water. My hands trembled so hard I spilled half of it.

Behind us, the Square was slowly erased. The tanks moved forward, the boots trampled, the monument loomed unchanged.

The late-night city smelled of cordite, gasoline, and—faintly, absurdly—incense from some temple refusing to adjust its schedule for our catastrophe.

十五 后记：许多年以后

I’m older now. My liver complains when I drink; my sleep comes in shallow, broken doses. Pregabalin is a scheduled drug, its sale recorded, its prescriptions scrutinized. Somewhere in a metal file cabinet, my old disciplinary record still sits, yellowing.

Sometimes, late at night, when the streets are as empty as my neurotransmitter reserves, I think of those weeks as one long, complex overdose.

The doses:

• Of hope, beyond any therapeutic window.
• Of fear, titrated badly.
• Of stimulants, anxiolytics, dissociatives—half-understood, half-worshipped.
• Of words, spoken in quantities that would have killed a smarter movement sooner.

We thought we were fighting one enemy: a State that turned medication into moral shorthand, that wrote “drug abuser” on a death to close a political file.
We forgot there were others.

In the shadows of the Monument, we fought each other as if there would always be time to reconcile:

• I condemned Dew Rain’s drug-selling empire, not just with facts, but with contempt, helping push him from arrogance into the arms of barbiturates and oblivion.
• I raged at Chicken Brother’s ecstatic nihilism, his conversion of suffering into spectacle, but I also envied the simplicity of his faith that any altered state was revolt.
• I snarled at Mouse-tail’s moral superiority, his citation-laden condescension, yet it was his translated magazines that carried better futures into our cramped rooms.
• I mocked Edward’s eagerness to be the “good reformer” in officials’ eyes, scratching his name neatly onto other people’s bruises.

And then there was me.

I liked to pretend I stood “above,” in a white coat of pharmacology. I drew clean lines between “OD experimenters” like us and “real junkies,” thinking that precise language would save us from stigma.
The State erased that line in three editorials.

I put receptors where compassion should have been. I used the vocabulary of “harm reduction” as a scalpel to cut people who annoyed me. In the worst moments, I sounded like the officials I hated, only with better terminology.
Words as high-dose stimulants, tearing apart what they were meant to focus.

None of the main players was clean:

• 55555, idealistic but not immune to opportunism, let his name be both shield and cudgel when it suited.
• Little Cat danced between mania and darkness with the help of whatever she could swallow, and yet, in her fragmented way, she was the only one who kept seeing us as fallible children instead of roles.
• Dew Rain dreamed out loud of an “addiction empire” and then, when his castles dissolved, chose the purest exit he could.
• Chicken Brother preached liberation through intoxication and ended up wandering, I heard, from province to province, half-shaman, half-burned-out street relic.
• Mouse-tail built FOW into a quiet network of readers and, in doing so, turned his own name into a brand, another soft monopoly.

We were all selfish, all arrogant, all broken.

The external enemy was real: an apparatus of power that saw in our talk of drugs a deeper threat than in the grand political slogans—because to challenge who defines “drug” is to challenge who controls pleasure, pain, and deviance.

But we were also our own enemies, our neurotransmitters misfiring in echo chambers.

In the years since, the world changed.

New synthetic cathinones, novel benzodiazepines, endless 2C‑x variants and indazole cannabinoids flowed around prohibition like water around dull rocks. The scheduling lists grew longer, the street chemistry more inventive.
Each new molecule another misspelled footnote to the manifesto we never wrote.

Harm reduction programs crept into some cities, always cautiously, always framed as “public health,” never as “rights.”
Articles about “drug policy reform” appeared in academic journals, written in careful passive voice, never mentioning tents, barricades, or boys high on stimulants facing tanks.

The foreign reports from that summer have ossified into clichés: “pro‑democracy movement,” “student protesters,” “crackdown.”
Some mention “rumors” of drug use among the youth, framed either as moral failing or exotic color. Almost none understood that for some of us, the central demand was not a parliament, but a leaflet that told the truth about what we were swallowing.

I keep, in a locked drawer, photocopies of three things:

• Spring-Wind’s notes on ayahuasca: looping handwriting, regret unlabeled as such.
• Dew Rain’s fatal line about an addiction empire—arrogant, childish, prophetic in the worst way.
• My own old ODWIKI entry, “Overdose: An Introduction,” with certain phrases underlined in hindsight:

“If we treat people who use drugs as already lost, they will oblige us.
If we insist some are ‘not like those addicts over there,’ we will not notice when the hammer falls on all of us together.”

Back then, I thought I was warning users against the State. I didn’t realize I was also warning myself against myself.

When I give quiet talks now—no official title, no movement banners—students sometimes ask, “If you could go back, what would you change?”

They expect me to say: “We should have left the Square earlier,” or “We should have focused on broader democracy.”
They’re not wrong. But that’s not my first answer.

I say: “I would have swallowed fewer pills and fewer insults. I would have spoken less and listened more. I would have refused to use the word ‘junkie’ even once, in any direction.”

I pause. “And I would have written our demands in blood chemistry, not in slogans. Because in the end, that’s where they kill you: your body, not your rhetoric.”

They sometimes laugh, uneasily. Some take notes. Some, I can tell, are already on something: eyes too bright, fingers drumming faster than the clock. The molecules rotate; the generations don’t.

In quiet moments, I think of that night when the Square burned and our drug lists burned with it. I remember Little Cat’s question: “Did we win?”

No.

We did not win. We did not even draw.

But for a handful of weeks, under big portraits and bigger lies, a group of dirty, insomnia-stricken, chemically compromised students stood in the heart of the capital and said, clearly:
“We refuse to let you call us evil for what we put in our veins. If you will call us anything, call us what we are: in pain, in love, in error, in search.”

That refusal—that small, specific “no” about one man’s pregabalin and millions of future pills—was crushed like everything else.

Yet chemicals have memories, of a sort. Receptors upregulate, downregulate. Brains learn.

One day, someone will open an old file, find a phrase that sounds like mine in a policy draft, in a counseling manual, in a doctor’s lecture:
“Use, misuse, dependence: these are not moral categories.”

They won’t know my name. They won’t know Chicken Brother’s, or Mouse-tail’s, or Dew Rain’s. Spring-Wind will be just a metaphor, not a boy.

The Square will remain a wide, clean space, tourists taking photos, guards watching.

And somewhere, in some rented room not far from there, a student will sit with a blister pack—pregabalin or something newer—wondering if taking it makes them weak or wicked.

If I wrote anything true in that long, bitter season, I hope it reaches their hand before the pill does.

Not to stop them—no policy, no story can do that—but to give them the one thing we asked for and almost never received:

A chance to choose with eyes open, not blinded by fear, or myth, or the slogans painted on both sides of the barrel.