The Incarnations

5. The Third Letter

HISTORY IS COMING for you. Do you hear it, coming up behind you in the dark? Dragging its iron chains and shackles, up the concrete stairs of Building 16? History taps you on the shoulder, breathes its foggy thousand-year-old breath down your neck. ‘Here I am, Driver Wang. Why don’t you turn around? Look me in the eyes?’ But you pretend not to hear. You whistle. You fumble the key in the keyhole. You slam the door of 404, turn the lock and hook on the security chain. There was nothing in the stairwell. Nothing but the dark.

There are others like us in Beijing. Once I bought a ticket from an attendant in Wangjing station, who was formerly a servant to the Empress Dowager Cixi (blinded in one eye when the Empress lashed out with her long nails in a fit of pique). Once at the National Library, the due date was stamped in my book by a librarian who was a graverobber during the late Ming (a depraved man who had carnal relations with the cadavers he dug up).

Some of the past incarnations rise up from the depths. They crawl up the throat of the host and peer beguilingly out from behind the eyes. They manoeuvre the host’s mouth, taking over the vocal chords and tongue.

‘I was a Peking Opera singer, who had his feet bound at the age of six to play female roles. I became addicted to the opium I smoked to ease the pain.’

‘I was an eighteenth-century Urumqi camel herder, with a goitre and three wives.’

Then, having made themselves known, they sink back down, leaving behind the host stunned by the temporary possession by the other selves within.

When I encounter one of our kind, I tally the former incarnations as a woodcutter counts rings within a tree. I date the soul as a Geiger counter dates carbon. Last week I met a shoe-shine boy in Wangfujing, who was first made flesh during the Neolithic era, when men were cave-dwellers and dragged their knuckles on the ground. When men danced around fires and had no language other than violence and grunts. The higher reincarnates, who have lived hundreds of times, tend to live as hermits far from the human fray. To meet one in the hustle and bustle of Wangfujing was rare. But there he was, beckoning me over to the wooden box where he crouched, a rag in his polish-blackened fingers. As he buffed my boots, I told him who I was and of my hopes of reunion with you.

‘Patience is a tree with bitter roots that bears sweet fruit,’ he opined.

He shone my boots to perfection and charged me five kuai.

Many of our kind go from cradle to grave ignorant of who they are. Some are now confined to asylums, and subject to medication, electroconvulsive therapy and round-the-clock supervision by white-coated medical professionals. Those who have known fame and notoriety in their former lives often struggle with anonymity. They roam the streets, bragging of the feats they accomplished back when they were Mencius or Li Bai or Sun Yat-Sen, until they are arrested and locked up, or heckled and beaten by drunks.

Fantasist. Mythomaniac. Liar. What names do you call me in your mind? No matter how scathing, I am not offended or deterred. My undertaking, as biographer of your past, is not one I take lightly. I work hard for your enlightenment. I am patient, diligent and devoted to the role.

I came back to Beijing to find you, Driver Wang, gusting back to the city with the Gobi sands. Once I knew your whereabouts, I rented a room nearby, on the eleventh floor of a run-down tower block. The room is a tomb of cement, with a mattress, a table and chair. The windowpanes are myopic, grimy with the polluted breath of Beijing. The melancholy glass weeps in heavy rain, and stagnant pools of tears leak on to the inner sills. The central heating is broken, so though I come from a region of China thirty degrees colder than the capital, I suffer the cold more here. Migrant workers from Henan province live above. They gamble and chatter and scrape chair legs over the ceiling throughout the night. Living here is often unbearable. But I remember my higher purpose and I endure.

Once I had found a room, I bought a second-hand computer, as dusty and old as an archaeological find. For days on end I shiver in a shroud of blankets, hunched at the screen. Every so often I pause my typing to briskly rub my hands and breathe warmth on to my icy fingers. I don’t know a soul in Beijing. The computer is my only companion, the overheating machinery spinning its internal fan. Sometimes the machine breaks down, goes silent and black. I reboot and pace nervously back and forth, waiting for the resuscitation of my only friend. The machine comes back to life and my heart leaps with relief. I resume my work and, as your biography takes shape on the flickering monitor, I am full of hope.

I watched you today, wandering with your daughter through the frozen wastes of Tuan Jie Hu Park, wrapped up against the January cold and blowing cigarette smoke into the fog. I saw your fatherly pride as she explored the paths and lake and bounced on the trampoline. I saw your concern as she wept over her lost boot. I saw how important Echo is to you. How you love her most.

But here’s the truth, Driver Wang. Blood, though thicker than water, never lasts beyond the span of one life. When the heart ceases to beat, blood oxidizes to rust and flakes away. And the other things that bind you to wife and child — the marriage and birth certificates, and legal documentation of family life, will be dust in a hundred years.

Our bond, however, transcends the death of the body, though we are hosted by flesh and blood, viscera and bone. Though we eat and sleep, laugh and weep, sneeze and catch colds, we differ from those condemned to live only once. When they die they are dead. After we die we live on.

Listen. Do you hear that? Outside the door? Strain your ears above the TV and the washing machine’s spinning drum. The chained beast of history is breaking loose. Do you hear his deep and ragged breathing in the dark?

History is knocking for you, his knuckles striking the door. Don’t pretend not to hear. Don’t pretend he’s not there.

Open the door, Driver Wang. Let him in.