Restricted Area

Uniform

The afternoon was blistering hot. Scorching rays of sunlight bounced off the asphalt road, rippling like the rising of suffocating steam.

The community workers had returned again to stand in front of Jiang Chijing’s neighbour’s house, complaining incessantly about the glass shards scattered across the ground and the black ink botch on the wall.

Just off work, Jiang Chijing walked out from his private garage. As soon as the two men saw him, they came up to ask, “Mr. Jiang, do you know when will Mr. Zheng be back?”

Jiang Chijing politely shook his head; he didn’t know either.

In this clean and tidy community, all the residents made a conscious effort to maintain a favourable community environment.

People would regularly mow their lawns and trim their gardens, even voluntarily washing the pavements outside their yard on occasion.

In such a harmonious environment, the sight of such a disorderly house—with its uncleared glass across the ground and unwashed ink on the wall—was incredibly jarring.

The community workers would practically come by once a day, but they were never able to bump into the Mr. Zheng that they yearned for.

Jiang Chijing couldn’t remember when it started but the man across the street never appeared again. It seemed to be from two days before, or was it three? In any case, after the incident that night, as far as Jiang Chijing knew, that man had returned only once.

Well, it was possible that he had moved to a relative’s or friend’s house because he didn’t feel safe in this environment.

Jiang Chijing didn’t find it strange, merely that he was unavoidably a little bored and unused to days without anyone to spy on.

However, the bright side was that he had moved here because he wanted to curb his bad habit of voyeurism. Now that his only opportunity to peek in was gone, it was rather convenient for him to keep his wandering eyes to himself.

There were three express delivery parcels stacked together outside Jiang Chijing’s iron fence. He brought the three parcels in and used a small knife to cut them open. They were the three items that he had purchased or sent for repairs recently.

The first contained a bottle of ink. Jiang Chijing had the habit of practising his handwriting. To him, ink was an essential item that he regularly used.

The next parcel contained a bottle of cologne. While this wasn’t an essential item, there were a couple of days every year when he would use it, thus he bought one to prevent being caught unprepared should the occasion arise.

The brand was the same as the one he smashed that night. Jiang Chijing had parted with his ex-boyfriend on good terms without any emotional entanglements. Having used this brand of cologne for a long time, he didn’t have to go out of the way to change to another one.

And the last parcel contained the antique mechanical watch that Jiang Chijing had failed to fix. Even if the model was already several decades outdated, the manufacturer gave a lifetime warranty.

By the rules of the prison, prison staff couldn’t bring their phones into the prison area. Jiang Chijing was used to using this old watch to tell the time. These days without a watch, he had unconsciously glanced towards his empty wrist ever so often.

The items that he lacked and broke were restored to their original places. At the end of it, the community workers also cleaned the glass shards from the opposite yard.

Only, his neighbour seemed to have vanished into thin air and the gaping bedroom window was never fixed. When gazing over from his house, Jiang Chijing felt oddly bereft.

***

“Morning, Officer Jiang.”

It was another ordinary working day about a month after that. In the bright and spacious locker room, his colleague, who had just gotten off the night shift, was yawning as he greeted Jiang Chijing.

Jiang Chijing worked as the prison librarian. It was considered a civilian post not a ‘guard’ in the strictest sense of the word. However, due to him wearing the same guard uniform as his colleagues, everyone tacitly put him among the ranks of the prison guards.

“Morning,” Jiang Chijing replied, taking off his white short-sleeved shirt and removing the dark grey uniform shirt from his locker.

At Southside Prison, there were three types of uniforms, namely, summer wear, winter wear, and formal wear. The summer and winter set only differed in how thick the fabric was and how long the sleeves were. On the other hand, the formal set would be worn for more solemn occasions.

The uniforms that the prison staff received only had one size and was not differentiated into S, M, L sizes. But due to Jiang Chijing being on the more slender side, while the shoulder region was a good fit, the fitting for the area beneath the ribs at the waist was conversely too wide. He took it to a tailor shop outside his community to be altered; the shirt now fit snugly to his waistline.

He buttoned his shirt all the way down. His lean figure was thereupon hidden behind the cloth. The stiff collar was meticulously straightened, and an ‘atypical’ prison guard appeared in the mirror.

Next to his strapping colleagues, Jiang Chijing was like a frail scholar. Although he was 1.8-metres tall, he gave off the impression that he could be taken down with one hit.

The main reason for this was that he had a clean and delicate appearance, letting others unconsciously assume that he was easy to bully.

Were his skin tone more tan, at the very least his features wouldn’t look as dainty. Unfortunately, not only did he have fair skin, his lips were even cherry-pink; it wasn’t any surprise that people would think that he was a pushover.

Back when he had first started working at Southside Prison, the warden had given him a well-intentioned warning that he should watch out for his personal safety.

Jiang Chijing naturally understood where the warden was coming from. Rather than his personal safety, it mayhap would be better to call it the safety of his pucker. But more than half a year passed without incident.

After changing into his guard uniform, Jiang Chijing went to collect from the mailroom the letters addressed to the inmates, then spent half an hour checking through the contents of each of them.

Jiang Chijing liked this task a lot because it was a justified form of voyeurism. He didn’t have to hold himself back, nor did he have to feel any kind of psychological burden.

More accurately, this couldn’t even be termed voyeurism but part of his job description.

Most of the inmates who wrote letters would be sincere and remorseful, concerned about their family, and hopeful for the future.

Jiang Chijing believed that in this world, there was no absolute evil, and these letters offered him a glimpse into the wider picture.

After delivering the letters to the cell blocks and keeping the replies to be sent out again, Jiang Chijing’s had essentially completed his tasks for the morning.

In all honesty, it was almost unbelievable how easy this job was, along with its generous employee benefits. It was only that they had to interact with convicts which deterred many people from seeking employment here.

Jiang Chijing’s office area was located in a quiet corner of the prison library near the windows. A quadrant-shaped office desk partitioned a fanlike space, and the area inside was only enough to accommodate the working space for one person.

Apart from Jiang Chijing, pretty much no one else would enter this area. Over time, it became his personal domain.

He turned on the computer to catch up on the news. The ongoing financial crime case which shook the country a while back had reached a verdict—Mr. Zheng from the hedge fund firm was sentenced to serve a year in prison, fined 300 million, and was taken into custody in court.

The trial was held in a local courthouse; from the looks of it, they would be expecting fresh faces in prison soon. Absently, he glanced out of the window then took out a book, Prison Rules, from the drawer.

Everyone who came into the prison to serve out their sentence would have to go through education and reformation, and their first lesson was precisely the responsibility of Jiang Chijing, the idler.

It was already afternoon by the time this new batch of inmates went through all the formalities.

The block supervisor appeared outside the library door, using a file dossier to knock on the door, telling Jiang Chijing, “I’ve brought them over.”

Jiang Chijing made a sound of acknowledgement. He clamped the slim book under his arm and took the dossier of the convicts’ information from the other person. Then, he started walking to a small meeting room.

There were a total of three convicted felons who came in today. As Jiang Chijing went down the stairs, he flipped through their files.

The file on top was for a telecom fraudster who had swindled a wealthy woman of her money. The next was a thug who had crippled someone in a brawl, such that the victim was incapacitated for life.

Then the last should be that sensational…

His steps stopped abruptly at the door to the meeting room. Jiang Chijing had one hand on the door that he had pushed open, staring in disbelief at the information in this file.

Zheng Mingyi, male, 27 years old, 1.86-metres.

It wasn’t this banal information that had shocked Jiang Chijing. Truly, what had shaken him to the core was the familiar face in the profile shot.

The messy hair that reached the ears was cut significantly shorter, the contrast causing those deeply-set facial features to appear even more unyielding. No matter how Jiang Chijing looked at it, this face was a spitting image of the face he was used to seeing through the monocular lens.

In other words, the fund manager Mr. Zheng mentioned in the news was actually the neighbour Mr. Zheng who lived across the street from him?

Jiang Chijing was shocked to the point of absurdity. It was no wonder that that man had disappeared for such a long time without even bothering to repair his window—as it turned out, he had been locked up in a detention house.

The three men in the meeting room were staring at Jiang Chijing, who was frozen at the door. He swiftly recovered, then took a deep breath and looked away from the dossier. He calmly met the gazes of the three men.

Jiang Chijing had to confess, when his eyes met Zheng Mingyi’s, his heart still tremored.

This was the guilty conscience of a voyeur, a psychological tremor that shook him from inside out. Never before had he looked Zheng Mingyi straight in the eye. The jet-black eyes were sharp, vigilant, and fathomless… reminding Jiang Chijing almost immediately of a seasoned hunter.

Fate often played jokes like this. He was the person that Jiang Chijing was more than eager to avoid, yet he appeared before his eyes in this manner without the slightest warning.

He really didn’t have any surplus time to remain shocked, because he could feel Zheng Mingyi soundlessly studying him—studying his features, studying his uniform, studying the book clamped under his arm.

Most convicts could be likened to tigers; if you tried to turn tail and flee, you would only be regarded as prey and meet certain death. Whereas if you calmly sent a deterrent with your gaze, it would be possible to dissuade the tiger from its hunt, gaining a slim chance of survival.

Jiang Chijing was well aware of this. He lengthened his strides again, walking in his Dr. Martens boots up to the meeting table, and slapped the dossier down on it. Lifting his chin slightly, he coolly looked down at the three men in front of him, and he said, “Good afternoon to you all. I’m your correctional officer, Jiang Chijing.”