The Incarnations (23 page)

‘I’m half an hour late,’ he snaps at Wang. ‘You should have gone the way I told you to!’

Wang ignores him. In front of his cab is an exhaust-spluttering bus overcrowded with bodies. An old man stares out of the back window at Wang with a look of crushed suffering. A news bulletin on the radio speaks of a public ban on spitting, swearing, smoking and queue-jumping during the Olympics. The Four Pests, the campaign has been called, after the Mao-era policy to eradicate sparrows, mosquitoes, flies and rats. Wang remembers Shuxiang telling him how, during her childhood, gangs of children chased sparrows from tree to tree, banging tin trays until the birds fell out of the sky, too exhausted to beat their wings and fly. The man with the barcode head shouts into his phone, ‘Look, I am
really late
. The taxi driver didn’t listen to me and now we are stuck in traffic . . .
Stupid cunt
.’

Wang waits until they have crawled up to Beixingqiao station before pulling over. He takes 3 RMB, enough for a single subway journey, out of his wallet, and leans around his headrest. He thrusts the money at the man in the back.

‘Take Line 5 three stops north, then change to Line 2,’ Wang instructs. ‘One stop west and you are at your destination. Now get the fuck out of my cab.’

The man hesitates, then accepts the 3 RMB. There is 20 RMB on the meter and, interpreting Wang’s waiving of the fare as an admission of wrong, he says, ‘You really need to do something about the stink of garlic in here!’

Then he takes his briefcase and slams the door. Wang is 23 RMB out of pocket but, as he watches the man’s barcode head disappearing into the subway entrance, he doesn’t consider it a loss.

The alley is different in the light of day, when the dirt and dilapidation are no longer veiled by dusk. Rotten cabbage leaves, wooden skewers from yang rou chuar and polystyrene take-away containers are strewn about, and the liquor store front is smeared, as though destitute alcoholics have been rubbing their noses up against the glass. The folding tables outside the Xinjiang restaurant are covered in last night’s beer bottles, and the hole-in-the-wall grill is black with soot. Behind the glass of the Heavenly Massage a teenage girl in a Supergirl T-shirt sits on a pink polyester sofa, her knee bent to her chest as she paints her toenails. In the evening’s red-bulb glow, the girl would seem temptingly exotic and other. But in the stark light of day she looks very plain, and much too young. She’s someone’s daughter, Wang thinks, probably hiding from her mother and father how she earns her living in Beijing. And, one day, she’ll be someone’s wife, hiding from her husband her sexual past. A bronze statue of the Goddess of Mercy stands on a shelf above the sofa. Wang can’t remember what the goddess’s powers are but knows they aren’t enough to protect the girls.

Wang sees Zeng’s co-worker through the barber’s door, leaning into his laptop and weaving from side to side as he pilots a virtual jet through a craggy mountain range. He opens the door, and the boy looks over, narrowing his eyes in recognition. How ugly he is, Wang thinks, looking at his round, belligerent face and spiky hair. The fighter jet crashes and explodes into a ball of flames, and the boy scowls harder.

‘Zeng Yan’s not here.’

‘Where is he?’ Wang asks.

‘Out.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Can I wait here?’

The boy wants to say no, but can’t. So he abandons his fighter jet, grabs a broom and sets about sweeping up cuttings from the linoleum. Wang stands out of his way by the wall, under two laminated, fake-looking diplomas from the ‘Beijing No. 1 Hairdressing Academy’, and watches him sweep. The boy has studs in his ears, too much gel in his spiky hair and fiery eruptions of acne on his neck. Though young, he has none of the manipulative beauty that Zeng had in his youth, and Wang doubts he commands much money from his customers.

Some rain splatters against the window, and Wang looks out at the stormy sky and wills the rain to come down harder and rinse the sand into the sewers of Beijing. His attention then snaps back to the barber’s as one of the wheeled chairs crashes into the wall beside him. Zeng’s co-worker has shoved the chair aggressively with his broom, which he is banging about, taking his frustration out on the linoleum. Wang wonders if he considers him a rival for Zeng. He can’t remember the last time anyone considered him a rival. Not in love, or anything.

‘You’re not from Beijing, are you?’ Wang says, hoping to strike up a conversation. ‘Where’s your hometown?’

‘I know who you are,’ mutters the boy, not looking up from his sweeping. ‘I know what you did to Zeng Yan in the hospital.’

Wang lurches inside at the mention of the hospital.

‘Whatever happened to him in the hospital was his own doing.’

The boy slams the broom upright, leans towards Wang and says, ‘You must have a hole where your conscience should be! He went through hell because of you. Why have you come back into his life, harassing him again? What do you want?’

Outside, sheets of rain are crashing down, dissolving the city in polluted waters. Wang shakes his head at him. No, he thinks, you have it wrong. Zeng is harassing me, not the other way round. But Wang won’t argue with the boy. He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.

‘Look,’ Wang says. ‘All I want is to talk to Zeng Yan. I am not here to harass him. I want to speak to him, then I’ll go, and I won’t come back. You have my word . . .’

‘Come back,’ the boy says, ‘and I’ll tell your
wife
.’

Wang is angry enough to hit him. He opens his mouth to tell him how sorry he’ll be if he goes anywhere near Yida, when the door swings wide. Zeng is out of breath and soaked by the downpour. Beads of water drip from his wet hair and glide down his cheeks.

‘Wang.’ Zeng smiles. ‘Good to see you.’

Wang can’t smile back. Though Zeng is casual, the longing that drove him to Apartment 404 last night shows through his eyes. Zeng looks between Wang and the boy and sees at once what’s been going on.

‘Wu Fei, we need shampoo,’ he says. ‘Go to Jingkelong and buy three bottles of the stuff we bought last week. And gel spray too.’

Zeng peels a 100-RMB note from his wallet and hands it to Wu Fei. The boy throws down the broom and storms out into the rain without a jacket or umbrella. He is drenched in seconds.

‘Please understand,’ says Zeng, ‘he has no family in Beijing. No friends. I’m all he has. He’s protective of me.’

Out in the alley, Wu Fei turns his head and shoots one last hostile look at Wang through the rain. Wang shakes his head. I am not your enemy, he thinks. You are your own worst enemy, boy.

The back room is dark and stuffy, and the bedsheets, though pulled straight, bear the residual stains and odours of men who have come and gone. In the low-wattage light Zeng reaches for Wang’s cheek and leans in. Wang pushes him back, his fingers in Zeng’s dripping-wet hair. ‘That’s not what I am here for,’ he says, though part of him, the weak, libidinous part, wants to give in, the way he had before.

Zeng doesn’t pressure him. He nods in acknowledgement of the changing rules and steps back. He pulls out his cigarettes and offers one to Wang, who refuses, wanting to make a habit of saying no. All day Wang has been unnerved by Zeng and his stalking. But now Zeng is in front of him he sees there’s nothing ominous or menacing about this slight and angular man offering him a cigarette.

Mattress springs creak as Zeng sits down. He pats the bed besides him, but Wang shakes his head and remains standing. Zeng shivers in his soaking T-shirt and flicks the cog of his faulty lighter over and over, trying to spark a flame.

‘Why did you come to my home last night?’ Wang asks.

‘Huh?’

Zeng’s cigarette remains unlit in his fingers as he looks up.

‘Last night, why did you come to my home?’

‘I was nowhere near your home last night. I don’t even know where you live.’

‘Bullshit. I saw you with my own eyes.’

Not exactly true. But Wang wants him to know there is nowhere to hide.

‘Then you were mistaken. I was here last night, Wang Jun. Sleeping in this bed. Ask Wu Fei . . .’

‘I’ve come to warn you not to come near my home again,’ Wang says, ‘because next time I will go to the police. I will show them the letters too.’

‘Letters? What letters?’

‘The letters you have been leaving in my taxi.’

‘I don’t know about any letters . . .’

Wang clenches his jaw. ‘Where do you steal the stories from?’ he asks.

‘What stories?’

‘The past-life stories. Where do they come from? Books? The internet? I know you don’t write them yourself.’

‘Past-life stories?’ Zeng widens his eyes. ‘You’re scaring me, Wang Jun.’

Zeng does look shaken, but Wang warns himself not to be taken in.

‘You forget how well I know you, Zeng Yan,’ Wang says. ‘The letters, the stalking, this is your way of getting me back for the stuff that happened in the hospital, isn’t it? I know you well, Zeng. I know how your mind works. You need help.’

Zeng flicks the cog of his lighter again, and it finally shoots out a flame. The cigarette shakes in his hand as he lights up.

‘I don’t need help,’ he says. ‘I’m not the same person you knew back in the hospital. That was ten years ago. I’ve changed.’ He takes another drag. Smoke drifts out of his nostrils and his eyebrows hunch over dark, troubled eyes. ‘I haven’t been stalking you. And I never wrote you any letters, because I can’t write. Not with a pen and paper. Not on a computer. I can’t even fill out a form. Wu Fei has to do it for me. What they did to me in that other hospital, the one I went to after the overdose, messed up my brain for good.’

Zeng expels smoke from his lungs. ‘They never cured my “abnormality”, but they left me illiterate, and with killer migraines and blackouts too . . .’

For a moment Wang aches with pity for Zeng. Then doubt kicks in. When he was younger, working in Guangzhou, Zeng used to pretend that his mother had cancer, to trick men into donating money for ‘hospital fees’. ‘Cheat or be cheated,’ that was once his motto in life.

‘You are lying,’ Wang says. ‘You are making this up.’

‘I’m not lying,’ Zeng says. ‘I don’t know where you live. I have never written you any letters. And I would never harass you or your family. I care for you too much, Wang Jun. I care for you now as much as I did back in the hospital . . .’

And Wang knows the last part of what Zeng says is true. That Zeng is just as obsessed with him as when they were twenty-two.

‘You know what I want you to do?’ Wang says.

Zeng looks at him miserably.

‘I want you to leave me alone. No more letters. No more stalking. Come near my family again and I will go to the police, and they will arrest you and put you back in the mental hospital where you belong.’

Zeng slumps on the bed, looking too dejected to speak. But he nods at Wang and says, ‘Okay.’

DID YOU KNOW
Yida is a reincarnate too? In her first life she was a flea who lived in the fur of a stray dog. She guzzled the dog’s blood and used her hind legs to leap out of harm’s way when the mongrel’s claws scratched at the itch of her. In Yida’s second life she was a tapeworm, hooked on to the intestinal wall of a cow. She grew to two metres in length on the cow’s ingested grass and caused a gut-ache so severe the beast lowed in constant pain.

Though human in her third life, Yida is still a parasite. She saps your energy as you sleep, Driver Wang, so you wake exhausted, feeling as though another decade has been dumped on you in the night. She weakens your immune system, which is why your lungs are losing the battle against the carcinogenic air. Yida has a degenerative effect on her customers at Dragonfly Massage too. They lie on the massage table and she kneads her hatred and malcontent into their backs. She pummels their muscles and they become knotted, misshapen and wrought. Under her fingers, cells fissure and spilt. Benign lumps of tissue turn malignant. Blood pressure rises and the blood thickens with thrombosis clots. Yida’s customers hobble out of Dragonfly Massage bent out of shape, but they think that the stiffness and aching is part of the healing process. Unaware of the damage Yida is doing, they return to her week after week, caught in a deteriorating cycle of pain.

We are all dying, Driver Wang, degenerating cell by cell. But living with Yida is hastening your demise. Only when you leave her will your life expectancy recover. Only by leaving her will you survive.

As your biographer, I resurrect our past incarnations. I summon our scattered ashes with my beckoning hand and they gather on the creases and fate furrows of my palm. I breathe life into our remnants, bringing about a slow reversal of death. Our dust turns into bones. Our skeletons calcify and grow plump with meat and blood circulates in capillaries and veins. Our muscle fibres strengthen and reattach to ligaments and bones. Our skin, teeth and hair grow back, lustrous and strong. Our hearts resume beating, and we rise up once more as living, breathing vessels of soul. Writing your third biography has been more punishing than the others. Deep, scalpel-carved wounds, stitched up hundreds of years ago, have been reopened with much darkness and agonizing pain. But I am willing to endure. For this torturous journey through the suffocating dark is the only way to get to the light.

AFLEDGLING, NOT YET
fifteen years old, borne in a palanquin through the Forbidden City’s west gate. Chair-bearers lower poles, the curtains divide and you emerge. Girl in a silk robe, plaits coiled into spirals, three-inch lotus feet bound tight as buds. The harem-keepers greet you, usher you into the Inner Palace. Through peepholes poked in the wax-paper windows of the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity, we peer out. We see through your eyes the magnificence anew. The acres of grand halls, deepest red with thrones and ceremony within. The endless armada of yellow-tiled roofs.

Whispers Imperial Consort Luminous Moon, ‘She has an inauspicious face. A widow’s peak. The harem physiognomist must be sleeping on the job.’