Chronicles of a Madman

His name is Wang Zhi. The name given by my grandfather means wisdom. The doctor's diagnosis was: a congenital developmental defect of the prefrontal lobe and a 15% enlargement of the amygdala. At the age of seven, he painted sunflowers all over the hospital walls. The attending physician wrote: Paranoid schizophrenia. At the age of twelve, he invented a spell and silently recited "It's not true now" three times, and the world became quiet. Eighteen years old, got a perfect score in mathematics in the college entrance examination and zero score in composition. At the age of twenty-three, he stopped taking medication and relapsed, and was admitted to a mental hospital. Met A Xiu there. The student nurse, everyone walked around him, she didn't. She said he had beautiful eyes. He said that was an illusion. During the years when he was hospitalized, he exchanged the sleeping pills he had secretly saved for pens and manuscript paper, and secretly wrote for three years, but was confiscated by doctors seven times. Later, a book was published. Five hundred copies were printed, and most of them were moldy in the warehouse. The editor deleted and revised it, and finally only a thin volume remained. The title of the book is "The Chronicles of a Madman", and the only decent sentence he ever said is printed on the cover: "Normality is an illusion that most people maintain, and he just has the misfortune - or luck - not to learn it." The book didn't sell. Axiu bought a hundred copies and gave them to everyone she knew. He was later discharged from the hospital, relapsed, and was hospitalized again. I worked odd jobs in a community rehabilitation center, sold newspapers, and lived on subsistence allowances for several years. I would write a few words when I was awake, but when I was confused, I would be sent back to the ward. In the winter when I was forty-seven, I got a flu. County hospital, the same hospital where I was born. The nurse pushed him into the morgue, his wrists exposed under the sheets as bony as a stick. The book has not been reprinted. Occasionally someone comes across it at a used bookstall, flips through two pages and puts it down.