The Incarnations

17. The Fifth Letter

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.