The Incarnations

3. The Second Letter

AS BIOGRAPHER OF our past lives, I recount the ways we have known each other. The times we were friends and the times we were enemies. The times lust reared its head, and we licked and grazed on each other’s flesh. Once you were a eunuch. Your mother bound your wrists behind your back, laid your pubescent organs out on a chopping block, and severed you from the ranks of men. Once you were a Jurchen. The Mongols invaded our city, charging in on horseback, raping, beheading, and capturing slaves. They reduced Zhongdu to ruins, and cluttered our gutters with cadavers and severed limbs. They drove us forth across the Gobi Desert, and we fled during a sandstorm and sheltered behind rocks smooth as prehistoric eggs, jutting up to the sky.

Once you were a Red Guard, rampaging through Beijing, intent on destroying the Old Culture, Old Society, Old Education and Old Ways of Thinking. You raided the homes of class enemies, carting the ‘Ill-gotten Gains of the Exploiting Classes’ off in wheelbarrows, after beating the rightists in a gang of teenage girls.

Months later, I aided and abetted your suicide. You bared your thin, blue-veined wrists to me in the school toilets, and shouted, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ as I slashed each one with the blade. Then you plunged your wrists into the mop bucket, and your patriotic blood turned the water red as our national flag. I wanted to rip tourniquets out of my shirt and staunch the flow. But a promise is a promise, and I severed my own wrists with the stinging blade. Once. Twice. And the darkness roared, like the Great Helmsman’s fury, that I had taken my fate into my own hands.

Can you guess where I am as I write this, Driver Wang? Hint: Baldy Zhang’s Mao Zedong pendant hangs from the rear-view and in the map-holding compartment of the door is a wallet of family snapshots. Echo aged three in Mickey Mouse ears. Yida on your lap as you smile together in a photo booth. That’s right. I am in your taxi, outside Building 16.

A security guard patrols your housing compound. Three times he has passed your cab, shining his flashlight into the bushes and startling the stray cats. Three times he has failed to see me in the driver’s seat, straining my eyes under the dim overhead light. There are a thousand fading scents here; cheap perfume, nylon tights, cigarettes, the man-made fibres of winter coats and, beneath all this, your distinctive odour of hormones and sweat. Other remnants of you remain here too. Follicles, and scales of dead skin on the headrest. Molecules of breath.

Building 16 is in darkness. There is no one at your window now, but I have seen your wife and daughter there during the day. Yida hanging machine-damp laundry on the balcony rail. Echo fogging the glass with her breath, then dragging her finger through the condensed steam. Last week I saw you washing the windows. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows, splashing soapy water on the pollution-smeared panes, squeezing out the excess from the sponge. Ephemeral rainbows glistened in the soap bubbles; spectrums of colour that imploded against the glass. Your cigarette smoke billowed in your eyes as you worked. Washing windows you have washed a hundred times before and will wash a hundred times again.

There is no one at your bedroom window now, because the three of you are sleeping. Echo in her bed in the corner. You and your wife in the larger bed. Cages of ribs rising and falling, as lungs inflate and deflate. Eyelids palpitating with the stimuli of dreams. Three separate minds processing the day’s events. Three warm-blooded mammalian bodies at rest, regenerating cell by cell. Snoring as you breathe into the dark.

I understand your need to be with your wife. Yida is a woman who stirs up in men the animal instinct to fuck and procreate. Tempting men as spoiled fruit tempts flies. But sleeping with Yida must be a sad and lonely experience, for the pleasure and the rhythm of coitus do not amount to intimacy. Your soul detaches when you conjoin with her and looks away. And I don’t blame your soul for averting its gaze. The thought of you with your wife repulses me too.

Please do not misunderstand me. You aren’t the one I am disgusted by. In other incarnations I have explored every inch of you, with tongue and fingers and eyes. No matter how dilapidated, scarred and mutilated your body, I have always found you beautiful, for it is the soul beneath I seek.

The sky is lightening now. In twenty minutes your alarm clock will ring. At quarter past seven you and Echo will leave the building together, bundled in your winter coats, fogging the air with your breath. You will climb into the driver’s seat. You will see this letter. You will wait until Echo is in school before tearing open the seal and reading it. Certain emotions will possess you. Anger. Scepticism. Fear. But these sentiments are transitory. Once reacquainted with your past, you will be grateful for my hard work.

To scatter beams of light on the darkness of your unknown past is my duty. For to have lived six times, but to know only your latest incarnation, is to know only one-sixth of who you are. To be only one-sixth alive.