The Incarnations

12. The Fourth Letter

TODAY IS MY tenth day of exile. Newsprint blocks the windows and electricity drips through the cord into the 40-watt bulb. The machine wheezes and gasps, as though protesting the darkness I feed into its parts.

For ten days, I have abstained from you, Driver Wang. No letters. No visits to Apartment 404. No riding in your taxi or watching you in the street. For ten days, I have been chained to my desk, preparing your historical records, my fingers stiffened by the cold, struggling to hit the correct keys. The machine huffs and puffs and loses consciousness. I reboot and wait impatiently for its revival, several times a day.

The Henan migrants gamble and scrape chair legs in the room above. I curse and bang the ceiling with a broom. I don’t go out. I hunch at my desk and tap tap tap at the keyboard, as singleminded as a prisoner tunnelling out of solitary confinement with a spoon. Though I have kept away from you, Driver Wang, you are my every waking thought.

Do you remember what it was like to die? Though your death count is higher than average, your departure from the host body is harrowing every time. Your soul, overcome by grief, floats above the rigor-mortis-stiffened corpse. You mingle with the gases of decomposition rising from the rotting flesh. You leap back into the stopped heart with such force the cadaver jerks (to the fright of workers in the morgue). However, to stay in the host body past the expiration date is a serious offence. Latecomers to the Otherworld are disciplined, and so you leave.

Our souls have never met in the Otherworld. We suffer for our prolific sins against each other separately, and our paths never cross. After incarnation is when we meet. After the hand of fate has snatched up our souls and placed them in the womb to be born again, kicking and screaming into the human world. Fate throws us in the same family, the same harem, the same herd of slaves. But fate sets us against each other. Fate has us brawling, red in tooth and claw. Fate condemns us to bring about the other’s downfall. To blaze like fiery meteors as we crash into each other’s stratosphere, then incinerate to heat and dust.

Now the time has come for my exile to end. For me to go out into the city, to the housing compound where you live. Past the junk-mail-stuffed letterboxes, electricity meters and internet cables, and up the concrete flights of stairs to Apartment 404. I will stand with palms and ear against your door, my eardrum straining at the sounds within: the TV selling cars and fast food; the water heater banging; the clatter of Yida washing dishes in the sink. My eardrums will strain to pick up the sounds. You and your wife and child a mere heartbeat away.

The time has come to deliver this letter. For in your sixth and current incarnation, Driver Wang, we must rebel against fate. So read on. Fate must be outwitted. It must no longer stand in our way.